Bitcoin Forum

https://medium.com/@abarisser/blockchain-scalability-idea-2-private-sparse-merkle-trees-f3aa100bfe80

Please give me feedback on this idea.

I'm happy to answer questions / feedback on this article in this thread.

In short, addresses sign root hashes of Sparse Merkle Trees (SMT).  For a Blockchain consisting of non-fungible tokens, each token corresponds to a unique leaf in an SMT.  An address sends a coin by providing proofs of membership and non-membership of txs off-chain to a receiving address.  These proofs of membership and non-membership are "anchored" by SMT root hash commitments that are on-chain.  Each SMT root hash commitment is specific to that address and commits to a (potentially very large) set of transactions for that block.

I'm trying to solve the blockchain scalability problem by putting a minimum commitment on-chain that correspond to a very large number of transactions off-chain.

I can't think of a way to falsify double-spends under this scheme, while I do think it gives a novel new way to improve blockchain throughput capacity.  But maybe I've missed something.

In any case, if you read the article, I would appreciate a discussion and feedback.  Let me know also if anything is unclear.

Thanks,
Andrew Barisser

Andrew, very glad to have you onboard in this forum, welcome  :)
End-to-End cryptographic proofs are an important and exciting field of investigation and we have zero knowledge proof line of algorithms that are very interesting and I strongly recommend taking a look at zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARgument of Knowledge , zk-SNARK (http://zerocash-project.org/media/pdf/zerocash-extended-20140518.pdf) concept which is the backbone of Zcash and most privacy centric coins.

As of your article: In first glance, it seems to me a bit odd, solving a sophisticated problem like this by simply burning the addresses, without giving birth to them ever. The simple question would be: What stops a spammer from flooding the blockchain with fake 'burn' messages?