What about periodically committing the entire UTXO set to a special checkpoint block which becomes the new de facto Genesis block? 

Daniele 

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Message: 5
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2017 16:41:29 +0000
From: Andrew Johnson <andrew.johnson83@gmail.com>
To: David Vorick <david.vorick@gmail.com>
Cc: Bitcoin Dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>
Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Hard fork proposal from last week's meeting
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I believe that as we continue to add users to the system by scaling
capacity that we will see more new nodes appear, but I'm at a bit of a loss
as to how to empirically prove it.

I do see your point on increasing load on archival nodes, but the majority
of that load is going to come from new nodes coming online, they're the
only ones going after very old blocks.   I could see that as a potential
attack vector, overwhelm the archival nodes by spinning up new nodes
constantly, therefore making it difficult for a "real" new node to get up
to speed in a reasonable amount of time.

Perhaps the answer there would be a way to pay an archival node a small
amount of bitcoin in order to retrieve blocks older than a certain cutoff?
Include an IP address for the node asking for the data as metadata in the
transaction...  Archival nodes could set and publish their own policy, let
the market decide what those older blocks are worth.  Would also help to
incentivize running archival node, which we do need.  Of course, this isn't
very user friendly.

We can take this to bitcoin-discuss, if we're getting too far off topic.


On Wed, Mar 29, 2017 at 11:25 AM David Vorick <david.vorick@gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> On Mar 29, 2017 12:20 PM, "Andrew Johnson" <andrew.johnson83@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> What's stopping these users from running a pruned node?  Not every node
> needs to store a complete copy of the blockchain.
>
>
> Pruned nodes are not the default configuration, if it was the default
> configuration then I think you would see far more users running a pruned
> node.
>
> But that would also substantially increase the burden on archive nodes.
>
>
> Further discussion about disk space requirements should be taken to
> another thread.
>
>
> --
Andrew Johnson
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