Tags:Bitcoin, blockchain, Ethereum, miner and storage
Abstract:
In Bitcoin and Ethereum, the nodes require a large storage to keep all of the blockchain data, such as transactions, UTXOs, account states. As of January 2020, the storage size of Bitcoin blockchain has expanded to 260 GB and will continue to increase. This is a big hurdle to become a block proposer or a validator. Although there are many studies to reduce the storage size, the proposed methods were that nodes cannot keep all blocks or cannot generate a block. We propose an architecture called Trail that allows nodes to hold all blocks in a small storage, and to generate and validate blocks and transactions. Trail does not depend on the consensus algorithm or the kind of fork choice rule. In this architecture, the client has the data to prove own balances, and generates a transaction containing the proof of balances. The nodes in Trail do not keep transactions, UTXOs and account balances. They keep only blocks. The blocksize is about 8 KB which is 100 times smaller than Bitcoin. Further, the blocksize is constant regardless of the number of accounts and the number of transactions. Compared to traditional blockchains, clients need to keep Merkle proofs additionally. However, with proper data archiving, the storage size on the client device will be about 1.6 MB. Trail allows more users to be block proposers and validators and improves the decentralization of the blockchain.