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Title: BitCoin - scaling to long histories, validating rarely used coins? Post by: jon.seymour on May 17, 2011, 01:44:58 PM As I understand it, the current bit coin clients need to validate the entire BitCoin block history upon initial start up. Even with a relatively short history (~124K blocks), this took 1-2 hours on my Mac OSX. In 5 years time, how long will this take? What if BitCoin became *really* popular?
Is this fundamentally necessary, or is it just a current implementation decision? If it isn't true, how does one validate the authenticity of coins that haven't been used for, say, 20 years? jon. Title: Re: BitCoin - scaling to long histories, validating rarely used coins? Post by: MacRohard on May 17, 2011, 03:20:38 PM Presumably you would cache the 'latest' state for every coin.
Title: Re: BitCoin - scaling to long histories, validating rarely used coins? Post by: carlerha on May 17, 2011, 03:42:43 PM Could the client not be shipped with the first x blocks good to go? Thought I read that somewhere…
Title: Re: BitCoin - scaling to long histories, validating rarely used coins? Post by: Stephen Gornick on May 17, 2011, 06:09:52 PM Could the client not be shipped with the first x blocks good to go? Thought I read that somewhere… You can download the blockchain seeded with 120,000 blocks. http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/blockchain One concern is the source of the block chain binary that you download (i.e., that one doesn't use SSL). Also being discussed is how to implement a lightweight client that includes headers-only (i.e,. all data needn't be stored, just the headers) - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7972.0 |