Proposal for self-pruning Blockchain

NOTE: This idea can be applied to Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum or any other blockchain-based technology.

Today, the Bitcoin blockchain is growing exponentially by leaps and bounds, without any way to cut down it’s size and remove unnecessary parts of it.
In a few decades it could grow into a petabyte-size database due to exponentially accelerating adoption and skyrocketing number of transactions, hurting decentralization.

But do we need _really_ need to keep all the data since the blockchain was born ?
Possibly not. Possibly, we can remove outdated parts of the blockchain.

But how ? What is the mechanism ?

I think it could be similar to how VMware or VirtualBox merging multi snapshots made over time into a single snapshot, flattening it.
I.e. all blocks, that older than, say, 4 years, are merged every 4 years.

In terms of Bitcoin network, it means creating a new genesis block every 210,000 blocks, after the next 210,000 blocks were mined, i.e. at 420,000 blocks (8 years), 630,000 blocks (12 years), etc... And that new genesis block will have the final state of the previous 210,000 blocks.
This new genesis-block will be created backwards in time, i.e. between block 0 and 210,000.

The idea, is that every client can do so in a decentralized manner, because this new genesis block will be behind 210,000 new blocks mined since, there will be no way to reverse transactions.
The only unsolved part for now, is what to do with older hashes, and merkle tree of the blockchain ? But maybe community can help here.

New Genesis block will have a number (0, 210000, 420000, etc...) and also timestamp, in seconds, since UNIX-1970.

NOTE: My proposal allows to rewrite the genesis block, which is potentially dangerous, it will have security implications, so this needs to be evaluated at more depth.

UPDATES in BLUE:
1. I read Satoshi whitepaper, and in chapter 7 he describes how to remove "intermediate" steps with zero balance.
2. I assume, that Bitcoin max. block size limit will be lifted, in order to allow Bitcoin to grow beyond Visa (2000/tps).
3. Additional idea: every 210,000 blocks is to clean "dust accounts" (i.e. accounts with balances below a certain value, say, 1 dollar-cent), transferring it to miners. -- (not in genesis block, but regular block, as it will be forwardly-created)

-Alexey Eromenko “Technologov”, 4.Jan.2015

What do you think of it?

Where is Nectarcoin Open-Source code ?

Please give us source code + whitepaper.
1. for wallet
2. for consensus mechanism

-Technologov

I don't think U.S. should invade other countries and stay there. Also in Ukraine there was no invasion, just a few agents/ stooges/spies.
However Russia tries to steal "Freedom of speech" from Ukrainian people, which won't fly.

Freedom of speech is top priority. Then goes email/web/Bitcoin Freedom.
Russia aims to steal ALL freedom.

That's fine.
Sanctions are good.
The world should condemn Russian for it's invasion vs. Ukraine.
Perhaps kick out Russia from the U.N and from SWIFT and from the Open-Source community.
Stop all business with Russian companies at all levels.

Putler must be jailed.
Russian fascists (Rascists) must be killed / driven out from Ukraine !
Long live Freedom ! Long live Ukraine !

Due to recent aggression of Russian army against my brothers, in Ukraine, I call for HELP !!!
Such medieval age aggression is completely unacceptable in the globalized 21st century.

Okay, let's start from the beginning.
In 2014, due to mass-protests in Ukraine, Kiev, called "EuroMaidan",
old pre-russian President Yanukovich (retreated to Russia) was replaced by much more business-oriented and Europe-friendly President Petro Poroshenko.
Right after that Russia occupied Crimea, part of Ukraine.
Recently Russia entered full force into mainland-Ukraine.

Here is the problem:
Ukraine, which was part of the Soviet Union,
now wants to become Free and break ties with the big Russian brother.
Russia, which was the biggest (main) part of the Soviet Union doesn't let it go.

What Russia wants?
-Dictatorship
-No freedom of speech
-No opposition
-No Bitcoin (and other crypto-currencies -- they are all banned in Russia)
(as compared to Ukraine, which recently put it's first BTM, Bitcoin teller machine in Kiev.)
-Radicalism, closed-border and anti globalization.
More specifics:
-Anti-war Protesters in Russia were all beaten by the Russian police and KGB special forces,
and put into jail.
-Closure of several McDonalds restaurants in Moscow.
-Food import ban by Russia from EU/US. (hurts both parties, but EU economy is 10x stroner, so Russians will get hit more than Europeans)

What Ukraine wants?
-Break ties from it's past -- Soviet Union and (big brother) Russia
-Become modern, and free democracy with freedom of speech
-Become part of the European Union
-Globalization

Russia has invaded Ukraine, and the global community must act to stop this agression.
And on 27.Aug.2014 it becae very obvious.
Russian officials, President Putin. and their foreign officer have said, that there are no Russian trrops
in Ukraine, but they are lying !

Proof-of-aggression by Russia: (in Russian, but you can use Google Translate)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/russian/international/2014/08/140827_ukraine_russian_soldiers_experts.shtml
-and-
http://lb.ua/news/2014/08/26/277196_plennie.html

Because all diplomatic acts and sanctions have failed to stop Russia, we need to act with force.
Ukrainian Army provides it's soldiers with weapons, clothes and basic food. That's it.
Communication radios, that were left since the soviet union age are usually broken, and there are few left.
The Ukrainian army was non-maintained for 23 years (between 1991, when Soviet Union was broken into smaller
countries and until this war in 2014).

We're gonna provide Ukrainian soldiers with stuff, that they lack
  through private volunteer organizations.
We'll provide them with personal body armor, better radio communications, night-vision,
  medicide, batteries and other stuff, that official Ukrainian army doesn't support.

Myself being Russian-Israeli-jew, so it is not easy for me to say this, but Putin (Russian President) has to be stopped.
I also have friends and family from Ukraine. Those were brother-nations, before this crazy war of 2014.
Putin, the Russian President, is guilty for this WAR ! He must be Stopped !
We, at our family, Eromenko, already entered sanctions against Russian Federation and call the same.

Remember: Every $1000 buys a personal armor -- gives additional chance to save Ukrainian life,
  and beat the Putin aggression !!

Action: Donate Bitcoin to enable Ukrainian soldiers to protect their freedom.

I also call for sanctions against Russian: Stop buying Russian products !

===
Donate Bitcoin:
http://wings-phoenix.org.ua/vse-rekvizity
16W4SazX7JH2UJW9kngcsirK8BRJHq648d
===
-Alexey Eromenko "Technologov"

P.S:
What will happen if Russia wins?
-Bring dictatorship in the country
-No more freedom of speech
-I believe, they may attack Latvia or Poland next (This Putin is a blood-crazy dictator)
(risking peace of the European Union)
-They will enslave all Ukrainians
-Destroy Bitcoin community there (or drive them into black-market)

I think Putler (Putin, that behaves like Hitler), must be STOPPED at all costs !
Putler is to blame !
Aggressor in the 21st century has no place in the world !

I have started a donations campaign, and will donate myself also to Ukrainian soldiers !

Hello !

I would like to ask you to introduce 30-day volume (in addition to current 24-hour volume).
It will smooth out spikes and wild speculation into something more average.

Thanks in advance,
-Technologov

Proof-of-Stake means no mining possible (if I have no coins) ?

Hard Problems of Cryptocurrency:
https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Problems

esp. big one is "Code Obfuscator".

Ethereum is the Big deal !
Why? it allows decentralized Bitfunder ! (and many other things)
An introduction into Ethereum: (by Vitalik Buterin & Charles Hoskinson)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5FDvzj8YX4
a good video for developers: (by Dr.Gavin Wood)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xO1AxsYAkU8#t=13

Satoshi Nakamoto potentially may become the world's first trillionaire, yes.

Hamas is a terrorist organization.
Their ONLY job in life is capturing and killing 3 Israeli children last month !!! This *MUST* be REVENGED !!!

The system works like this:
salt = 14-bit random date (birth of date) + password (average quality human password does 50-bits)
then key stretching adds another 14-bits.

In the end, we get hash of a salted password.
The total strength will be like 78-bits, for a medium quality password.
As for applying same salt on every round, I do not understand what will it give us.

The idea of key stretching is to use a short password (like 40-bits or 50-bits) and stretch it to the maximum hash, of 128-bits.
In my software I do only 2^14 rounds, so I stretch by 14 bits only.

And guessing the second last (or last) hash would require cracking 2^128 key, instead of 50-bit human password.

something like "S$@PPlUTcfaw" is completely impossible to memorize by the average human.
So how this solves the original problem, of short human passwords?

And how exactly can you salt over 10,000 of SHA hash rounds?

Isn't safe? I didn't put anything wrong into it.
Well... people can always compile from source. This is Open-Source !

The file was created using InnoSetup/ MS VS C++ redistributable, pyQt4 and Qt4 libraries and py2exe compiler.
So I really don't know why AV doesn't like it.

UPDATE: I have contacted Symatec Norton AntiVirus group, and we will investigate this issue.

Seanzqt: More choice with different participants means more healthy and decentralized eco-system.
Also this is a new type of wallet. Brain-wallet with new ideas.

Isn't safe? I didn't put anything wrong into it.
Well... people can always compile from source. This is Open-Source !

Donate BTC:
1zEAtvzgh3GXRq4M9DySzLhamUpBEZpHY

Yea thanks !

The reason, that I avoided using names or places is due to spelling issues for foreigners.
A single family name in Russian: Ерёменко.

can be spelled as:
Yeremenko
Yuromenko
Eremenko
Eromenko
Juromenko
or any combination thereof...

of course it may be possible to use Unicode to write in own language. But for now I wanted to avoid spelling issues.

source of randomness:
Some users keep it stable (I use GMail for 10 years), but other change email every year.
Same for phone numbers.
My friend, Uzi, changed 8 (!!) phone numbers in two years. But other friend, didn't change in a decade.
With this, it may be difficult to remember what you had 20 years ago.

As for web version --
this is something I cannot trust, as my password may leak straight into a hacker's hands. (unless it is a simple HTML, that I can download into an offline PC).
hackers can silently replace the generator HTML with something... so no Web version I won't trust very much. For this reason, I store only trivial amounts of BTC in blockchain.info wallet.
And after Diginotar bankruptcy I don't trust SSL/HTTPS either. (my bank is insured by the government).
In my opinion blockchain-based technology might replace SSL/X.509 certificates in the future.

Key salt storage on Blockchain:
Another great idea: is to somehow store key salting hash on blockchain itself. (Ethereum allows to do this easily... but I dunno how-to store anything on the Bitcoin blockchain. Although a few experts were able to embed a few images, there is no how-to for python devs)
Obviously only connected clients can do that, but from desktop.
This will allow to store long, 128-bit salts.

ASICs and SHA algo:
As for hashing change .. well I don't know which one is secure.
Litecoin claimed that their hash is ASIC-proof, yet came KNC miner and built a Scrypt-ASIC.
This field needs more research.

-Technologov

Hi,

I'm gonna create a way to make easily memorizable, yet fairly secure,
Bitcoin brain-wallet.

The main problem I'm trying to solve is that powerful computers can attack trillions
of combinations per second.
And the average human password is too short and therefore too weak to withstand such an attack.
So a normal 8-character random password can be cracked in just a few minutes.

After some work, I was able to build a next-generation offline Bitcoin brain wallet with 2 techniques:
key salting and key stretching.

To strengthen normally weak human passwords, I added few additional techniques:
1. Key stretching.
2. Key salting equivalent.

Let’s review each:
1. Key stretching happens after the password was entered, but before Bitcoin keypair was generated. Basically a computer runs 10,000 or more rounds of hashes, recursively, and using previous hash as an input for next generation. For atacker to match us, he will have to run exact same procedure on every try, slowing him down by the same factor for every single attempt to crack our passwords.
in v1.0 the program runs 16384 rounds. This is eqivalent to have a stronger password by 14-bits.
More rounds means more security, but then slow computers (such as ARM or Intel Atom) will not be able to compute hash fast enough, and user-experience will suffer.

2. The standard key salting technique uses a random number, that is stored in a shared database (as in /etc/passwd in UNIX machines), that is recommended to be as big as the key itself, namely 128-bit salt. The salt number is always public. It is used against rainbow attacks, where evil hackers pre-computes hash tables and steal bitcoins from there, once you deposit any.
But it is not possible to remember a random number, so I must resort to something else.
Something that has equal random distribution, everyone remembers, has no spelling errors.
Birth date !
We have 365 possible birth-dates per year. Productive populaion between 20-65 (45 year span) gives us a rough number:~= 16,425 possible birth dates, which adds 14-bits to our password strength via key salting method.

So combining both techniques, I was able to effectively achieve an extra 28-bit of password strength without requiring the human user to memorize this extra data, which should help convert even a medium quality password into a strong one, and a strong password into a great password !

***COIN-BRAIN***
https://sourceforge.net/projects/coinbrain/files/
WhitePaper + sources + Windows Setup !

-"Technologov", 25.Jul.2014.

Well, that wallet.dat was mistakenly left by me on a public server a year ago.

Just found by mistake by Mr.syabiz.
Apologies.
Case closed.