Reducing node size with merkle tree

[mymenace]

Trying to understand nodes and data, not sure if this is the place for it, anyways


...."I don't anticipate that fees will be needed anytime soon, but if it becomes too burdensome to run a node, it is possible to run a node that only processes transactions that include a transaction fee".....

http://bitcoinfoundation.org/forum/index.php?/topic/54-my-first-message-to-satoshi/



Is the above an example of a merkle tree and is this already used in bitcoin?

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1110/how-do-i-implement-a-merkle-tree

https://bitcoin.org/en/glossary/merkle-tree
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree


Could this be used to reduce data costs with mining?

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[achow101]

No, that is not an example of a merkle tree. In fact they are talking about two completely opposite things. A merkle tree is a cryptographic structure, the node stuff is networking.

A merkle tree is a tree of hashes. At the base are individual hashes, in the case of bitcoin, those hashes are the hashes of all of the transactions in a block. Each hash is hashed with another hash. The resulting hashes are the next level. This process repeats until only one hash remains. That is the merkle root, and that is included in the block header.

For the nodes, Satoshi was talking about node policy for accepting transactions to the mempool. His statement is currently used. If a transaction contains a fee that is too low, the node will reject it. That threshold for Bitcoin Core (the most common node software) is 0.00005 BTC/Kb. This can also be configured by the node owner.