Author: Алексей Мутовкин 2017-09-26 07:10:43
Published on: 2017-09-26T07:10:43+00:00
The discussion on Bitcoin-dev mailing list started with a proposal regarding demurrage and trimming of old blocks. The author argued that without some sort of limit on the maximum length or size of the blockchain, it becomes unsustainable in the long run and more centralized. He proposed limiting the blockchain to either 2^18 blocks (slightly less than 5 years) or 2^19 blocks (slightly less than 10 years), and each time a block is mined, the oldest block(s) beyond this limit is trimmed from the chain and its unspent transactions are included in the reward of the mined block. The author believed that this proposal would keep the costs of the miners balanced with the costs of the users. However, ZmnSCPxj responded by stating that demurrage is impossible and suggested using OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY, which requires that a certain block height or date has passed before the output can be spent. It can be used to make an "in trust for" address where you disallow spending of that address. In his opinion, it would be better to put such additional features as demurrage in a sidechain rather than on mainchain.Patrick Sharp, who had proposed demurrage and trimming, thanked everyone for their responses and withdrew his proposal for the time being. He also suggested storing the hash of the current or previous UTXO's in the block header so that pruned nodes can verify their UTXO's are accurate without having to check the full chain and/or maybe include a snapshot of the UTXO's every x blocks.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T19:04:02.740834+00:00