Re: [bitcoin-dev] UHS: Full-node security without maintaining a full UTXO set

[Gregory Maxwell <greg@xiph.org>]

On Wed, May 16, 2018 at 4:36 PM, Cory Fields via bitcoin-dev
<bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> Tl;dr: Rather than storing all unspent outputs, store their hashes.

My initial thoughts are it's not _completely_ obvious to me that a 5%
ongoing bandwidth increase is actually a win to get something like a
40% reduction in the size of a pruned node (and less than a 1%
reduction in an archive node) primarily because I've not seen size of
a pruned node cited as a usage limiting factor basically anywhere. I
would assume it is a win but wouldn't be shocked to see a careful
analysis that concluded it wasn't.

But perhaps more interestingly, I think the overhead is not really 5%,
but it's 5% measured in the context of the phenomenally inefficient tx
mechanisms ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1377345.0 ).
Napkin math on the size of a txn alone tells me it's more like a 25%
increase if you just consider size of tx vs size of
tx+scriptpubkeys,amounts.  If I'm not missing something there, I think
that would get in into a very clear not-win range.

On the positive side is that it doesn't change the blockchain
datastructure, so it's something implementations could do without
marrying the network to it forever.