Shared Blockchains

[deadserious]

I'm still trying to wrap my head around some concepts so forgive me if the question is naive or completely out there...

I'm thinking about a local network situation where several users all have their own wallet files but for space and bandwidth reasons there is only one copy of the block chain shared between each user.

Is there a technical reason that you could not have a shared trusted blockchain which was used by multiple clients for validating transactions in their wallets?  Assuming that blockchain is trusted, is there a security risk in doing this?

[kjj]

There currently isn't a mechanism for that.

The closest you could do right now is to run a node with external connections on one box, and then have all of your local wallets connect to that one.  Traffic would be minimized, but space would be unchanged.

You would get very close to the same effect by having all local nodes connect to each other, in addition to their normal external connections.

Or, do you mean like on one computer with multiple users?  If so, you might be able to give each profile a link (I think NTFS calls them junctions) to a single common set of block database files.  That would probably get messy with database locking if more than one client is running at a time.

Developers are already working on various light modes that would probably do what you want to do.

[TiagoTiago]

Would it work if you have the blockchain be stored in a folder shared in the network and have all clients using that same chain at the same time? Would it work if all but one client had only read-only access to the blockchain files to reduce the chances of corrupting it?

[deadserious]

There currently isn't a mechanism for that.

I understand. 

I was asking more a conceptual question to determine if it was worth the time tweaking the client code for my purposes.

[rabit]

Make a server version which has the additional commands "getaddresbalance <public key>" and "transfer <signed transaction data>" and a client version which can ask the server for balance and send the signed transaction data to the server.