Author: Peter Todd 2014-03-25 12:28:51
Published on: 2014-03-25T12:28:51+00:00
The issue of scalability in Bitcoin is tackled by proposing the concept of tree-chains which involves splitting the transaction volume so that each miner only keeps up with a portion of it. The problem currently is that moving value between chains requires trusted third parties and merge-mining suffers from 51% attacks if the chain being merge-mined doesn't have a majority of total hashing power. Tree-chains solve this issue by turning the linear blockchain into a tree and splitting up the UTXO set so that individual miners/full nodes only deal with subsets of the tree. This would significantly reduce the bandwidth that any one miner would need to process. Each transaction output would get a unique identifier, say txoutid=H(txout) and we put those outputs in blocks appropriately. A block header data structure is proposed which includes prevBlockHash, blockContentsHash, target, nonce, and time. The PoW is valid if H(blockHeader) is valid.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T15:42:42.961678+00:00