Author: Gregory Maxwell 2018-05-17 16:56:39
Published on: 2018-05-17T16:56:39+00:00
In a recent post to the bitcoin-dev mailing list, Cory Fields discussed a proposal to store only the hashes of unspent outputs rather than their full data. The proposal suggests that this change could result in a 40% reduction in the size of a pruned node, with less than a 1% reduction in an archive node. However, Fields notes that it is not entirely clear whether the 5% ongoing bandwidth increase required by this change would be worth the reduction in node size, as the size of a pruned node has not been cited as a usage limiting factor. Fields also suggests that the overhead of this change may actually be closer to 25%, as the current transaction mechanisms are inefficient. However, the proposal would not change the blockchain data structure and could be implemented without permanently marrying the network to it. Overall, while there is potential for this proposal to improve efficiency, further analysis is needed to determine whether the benefits outweigh the costs.
Updated on: 2023-05-20T13:10:58.699315+00:00