BitCoin - scaling to long histories, validating rarely used coins?

[jon.seymour]

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.

[1715066234]

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[1715066234]

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[MacRohard]

Presumably you would cache the 'latest' state for every coin.

[carlerha]

Could the client not be shipped with the first x blocks good to go? Thought I read that somewhere…

[Stephen Gornick]

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