Redecentralization: building a robust cryptocurrency developer network

[justusranvier]

If you look at Electrum/b.i/Mycelium/etc then the main feature they add on top of that is the ability to query a full block chain index rather than scan it. This results in faster query response times, but at the cost of maintaining a huge database on the server side.

btcd maintains a full blockchain index by default. I think Bits of Proof does as well. Not sure about Obelisk.

Bitcoind may in fact be the odd implementation out by not doing that by default.

[Mike Hearn]

I assume Obelisk does because otherwise there'd be not much point to it, what would it add over just using p2p nodes? Also that's what Electrum does.

You can tell bitcoind to maintain an index of txhash to tx, but I recall sipa saying that it resulted in huge disk space blowup and that's not even a full index. You can't look up address-to-txns that way.

BitEasy is a block explorer built on bitcoinj and I know Alex was complaining about the giant databases that resulted from indexing the chain.

[behindtext]

I need an epic quest to level up.

this reminds me of a great quote from a friend of mine "the only place you can earn experience points is at burning man".