Published on: 2022-02-14T05:19:18+00:00
The email discusses the issue of data deletion in computer systems and proposes a solution based on blockchain technology, specifically Bitcoin. The author argues that nothing should be deleted from the blockchain permanently because clients need to validate the entire blockchain. While acknowledging the usefulness of pruned nodes, the author suggests setting nodes with the parameter `prune=1` for manual pruning or `prune={>550}` for automated pruning. The author states that their chain state database is only 4.9GB and easily manageable by the standard Bitcoin Core client.The email includes contact information for Willtech, go-overt.com, and DUIGCO API, but also includes a disclaimer that the email does not constitute general advice.Alarming statistics are mentioned regarding Bitcoin addresses with balances of less than 1000 Satoshis, which make up approximately 7% of the total number of UTXOs (unspent transaction outputs). There are over 8 million addresses with balances of less than $1 and over 13.5 million addresses with balances of less than 0.0001 BTC. BitInfoCharts provides a link for dust analysis, showing that the first address contains over 1.7 million dust UTXOs.Shymaa Arafat suggests incentivizing people to collect these small UTXOs into one of at least $5 or $1 during low-fee times. Over the past four days, the number of addresses holding less than 1000 Satoshis has been increasing by around 2,000 each day, while the number of addresses holding less than $4.1 has been increasing by 4,000 to 8,000 per day. It's important to note that the number of addresses does not necessarily reflect the number of UTXOs.There are approximately 0.6 million non-standard and burned UTXOs, which can be misleading regarding the value they hold. Shymaa suggests archiving these UTXOs to secondary storage at an additional cost, along with the small UTXOs mentioned earlier. However, Pieter Wuille argues against deleting or archiving these UTXOs, as it could be considered theft and potentially destroy valuable funds owned by people. He suggests using the amount as a heuristic for determining what to keep and for how long, and also recommends investigating the use of two levels of storage - disk and in-RAM cache.While implementing archiving as a standardness rule may be feasible, it deviates from economically rational behavior and would likely be controversial as a consensus rule.
Updated on: 2023-08-01T00:05:47.269173+00:00