- Dec 16, 2015
- 2,806
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2½ years on, this question seems awfully prescient (entire AMA worth reading!):
The problem with "Bitcoin Unlimited" is that nodes will have to grow to the size of server farms (Satoshi's quote not mine), and users will have to trust these nodes ... leaving the network open for hacking, theft and breaking distributed trust.
However, if Bitcoin were to mine a UTXO hash on-chain, this should be sufficient to scale Bitcoin for massive numbers of small-value transactions - and there's no need to break trust.
How it could work:
Right now Bitcoin ships with a hard coded UTXO (ZERO) and checkpoint (Genesis). If the UTXO was mined into the chain... then any new node that spins up could just download a UTXO, and verify that it's part of the main chain.
New generation transactions can happen solely in extension blocks, with no block size limits. And these extension blocks can be vetted, verified the way main chain blocks are....but the main block will now only consist of a chain of mined UTXOs + the legacy chain before activation.
The extension blocks are hashed to the main chain, and many thousands can be downloaded from peers by a new node who wants to verify that recent transactions are consistent with a downloaded UTXO. But ultimately the only thing that people care about is the UTXO, which is comparitively small - and can now be easily verified.
Sure, the resulting network would be a hard-fork, but would be truly unlimited... with no limit to the number of transactions that can be processed, and no memory or bandwidth problem with new nodes coming on board.
If we're going to hard-fork... lets hard-fork to a network that allows infinite scaling and high distribution.
dafuq?!? It's so good to see you back! We were worried!Gold collapsed. Bitcoin UP.
If that's the case, chalk up one more point for 'Segwit is flawed' ...No one is incentivized to actually create those [Segwit] utxos in the first place.
How wrong those Gox insiders were when they predicted the Gox news would take bitcoin down to $1.I believe we just passed the gox all--time-high on Bitstamp.
Edit: and continuing up.
I'm not sure that's quite true. First, you're incentivised to advertise segwit addresses instead of traditional addresses for receiving payments, because this gives you segwit UTXOs that you can spend more cheaply. Second, you're incentivised to use segwit for your change outputs, because that directly gives you segwit UTXOs you can spend more cheaply.Am I hallucinating or is there maybe a problem here? --