Author: rob.golding at astutium.com 2013-09-08 03:56:17
Published on: 2013-09-08T03:56:17+00:00
Bitcoin's concept of one-shot addresses doesn't fit with people's mindset, making it difficult to get merchants to set up separate addresses for each client. People perceive addresses as jars you stick coins in and wallets as boxes that hold some of those jars. It is essential to have the ability to specify an address when sending from a wallet, and the option to discard an address once it has been emptied. This would allow users to discard some addresses as good housekeeping, and (once confirmed) stop any further use of that address. When balance-at-point-in-time is implemented, it would shrink the storage for other bitcoin users who choose not to have a full transaction set. It is important to take the average punter into account if bitcoin is to grow beyond being just an interesting experiment into global everyday use. For this to happen, old concepts must go with what already works. However, at present, there is no way to be completely trust-free without taking a balance-at-point-in-time, which would solve this problem and make the storage requirements much lower. The end-user will neither understand why nor want to pay the fee for dealing with their own coins. If a jar breaks, the contents can just be tipped into a new one. Similarly, if all these addresses are around, one may want (as good housekeeping) to discard some of them after moving the cash. Having the option to "intra-wallet" transfers with "also discard the sending address" would be a way of stopping any further use of that address (denied any further transactions by miners), and a way of shrinking the storage for all other bitcoin users. To verify the ability to send someone money, all that is needed is to know that one has that amount, not all the transactions that led to that state. A family wallet would mean that when on holiday, they could rent quad-bikes using just the balance in their family wallet. If there were no transactions on the balance at that point, it would need to know about the previous transactions. It took 140 hours to download and process the blockchain when moving to a new netbook, while a client had to wait for over 9 days before it had caught up. If all that was downloaded were the transactions since the last difficulty change (as one example of a fixed point), it would have been much quicker and not slowed down the hard drive.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T16:43:35.586709+00:00