Topic: Self-Archiving Block Chain (Read 660 times)

Even bettter, use Regtest and make your entirely own isolated Bitcoin network where you can do whatever you want.

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With this proposal, how do you find out the entire UTXO set so that your node can properly verify every transaction and block? With only 10 blocks, it will have to rely on a third party to tell it what is correct and not, and this essentially turns the full node into an SPV wallet.

Maybe run on testnet then. Or even testnet in a box.

Avoids the waiting etc.

as far as the students, what i really want is for them to have an isolated coin network, full nodes and to learn to build the tx's from scratch, perform any wallet and/or mining related function from command line and fully understand.  i only get a week of their time though.  our society has a major issue with technology being too easy sometimes.  software performing all the functions and when something goes wrong, they do not know how to fix it.  if you use paypal and jack up your account, they will help you fix it.  bitcoin, being decentralized, really needs for people to have at least some clue as to how to do something besides push a button. 

You can probably use most of the functions that Bitcoin-cli has, if there is an SPV client that offers this.

It is easy to cheat the wallet client if you don't have to prove that the blocks are branched out from the genesis block. Businesses should run a full node, to be safe. As long as bandwidth isn't too much of a problem, (100+GB for once) there is no issues since you can still prune it.

Btw, changed my original post slightly.

i personally know that there are many wallet options that do not need the full ledge.  i had them download a full chain wallet because they are students and i wanted them to be able to take full advantage of all cli commands and such and not be dependent upon a gui.  the thought just came to mind when i described the block chain comparing it to my checkbook.  I thought to myself that i have a drawer with at least the last ten checkbook ledgers, they fill up, i replace it with a new one.  i work with local businesses in various ways and when i talk about bitcoin i hear the gambit of excuses, complaints and other "reasons" why a certain person or business does not want to use it.  as we move closer and closer to a more full acceptance of bitcoin, i constantly try to compare new technology advances with the complaints that hold people back.  this was merely an attempt to get people thinking about possible changes in newer side coins or coins.  I did not mean to offend anyone and i am far from expert in crypto and bitcoin. 

Archived where? Why would you even want to do that?

So, if I use a sybil attack, I just need to run nodes with my own 10 blocks and feed them to the victim? The victim wouldn't know if the 10 blocks is actually stem out from the network. For example, an attacker can just mine 10 blocks with low difficulty and send it to the user.

Sorry but you can't. Full nodes indexes the entire Blockchain and looks for transaction related to any addresses that is associated with any address in the wallet.

If you import a wallet, you will have to ask another server to give you all the information. There is an extremely HUGE problem with this. Lets go to this part then. What you are doing is rather similar to SPV clients. They download the block headers and they ask the nodes for transactions related to the address and they verify that each transaction indeed exist in the blockchain that they downloaded. If they don't do this, they will literally be blindly trust what the nodes say.
Not a new idea, still not possible. If you don't even download the block header, you cannot use Bitcoin without fully trusting a third party.

You don't need the full blockchain, you run a SPV wallet. End of story.

SPV wallets: Downloads the block header. Verifies that all the transaction are indeed included in the blockchain. SPV can be similar in the sense that they will still be trusting the nodes to supply them with blocks that are valid. SPV will however, only use block headers that has the LONGEST proof of work. This is harder to attack than the above.

I just got six new people started with bitcoin today.  their main complaint is the wait for the block chain to download.  i admit that the excitement of it all starts to fade when a software wallet is unusable for two days.  when i described the block chain to them, i used my checkbook ledger as an example.  that made me think of a possible code change for newer coins.

Now, each new block carries a hash code from the previous block.  what if we devised a way that the "current" block chain of a coin was only 10 blocks deep.  that covers rooting out a bad fork and the number of confirmations for most businesses.  as a new block is hashed, the eleventh one back is archived and perhaps sends a hash of some kind to the new block. the new block has its own hash, the previous hash and an archived "marker" hash.

i am thinking from the hip and it might be hard, but this is wholly possible. every wallet will have the ability to pull any block from, still transparent.  most sites will use the entire block chain to operate as a block explorer, but software wallets and casual use wallets simply download the last ten blocks on the first use and start working.  i only see a problem with quickly locating and viewing a past tx that is older than ten blocks.  querying a block is easy, just go to that block, but the daemon would have no way of knowing what block an old tx is in without accessing a specialized network node.

this would mean that wallet types would need to be chosen carefully to start and would vary much.  assume that anyone that wants to operate a full node would need a "node" wallet and daemon and need the whole block chain.  user wallets would only download and access the ten blocks.  mining wallets?? not sure.  just a thought as we slowly evolve that original bitcoin code, both in bitcoin itself and in new coins/tokens