I hope I'm not thread-jacking here, apologies if so, but that's the approach I've taken with the node I'm working on.

Headers can be downloaded and stored in any order, it'll make sense of what the winning chain is. Blocks don't need to be downloaded in any particular order and they don't need to be saved to disk, the UTXO is fully self-contained. That way the concern of storing blocks for seeding (or not) is wholly separated from syncing the UTXO. This allows me to do the initial blockchain sync in ~6 hours when I use my SSD. I only need enough disk space to store the UTXO, and then whatever amount of block data the user would want to store for the health of the network.

This project is a bitcoin learning exercise for me, so I can only hope I don't have any critical design flaws in there. :)

From: tamas@bitsofproof.com
Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2014 21:20:31 +0200
To: gmaxwell@gmail.com
CC: bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Why are we bleeding nodes?


Once headers are loaded first there is no reason for sequential loading. 

Validation has to be sequantial, but that step can be deferred until the blocks before a point are loaded and continous.

Tamas Blummer
http://bitsofproof.com

On 07.04.2014, at 21:03, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 12:00 PM, Tamas Blummer <tamas@bitsofproof.com> wrote:
therefore I guess it is more handy to return some bitmap of pruned/full
blocks than ranges.

A bitmap also means high overhead and— if it's used to advertise
non-contiguous blocks— poor locality, since blocks are fetched
sequentially.



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