Can I read CoinPrune: Shrinking Bitcoin's Blockchain Retrospectively on EtoBox?

CoinPrune: Shrinking Bitcoin's Blockchain Retrospectively by Matzutt, Roman; Kalde, Benedikt; Pennekamp, Jan; Drichel, Arthur; Henze, Martin; Wehrle, Klaus is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is CoinPrune: Shrinking Bitcoin's Blockchain Retrospectively about?

Popular cryptocurrencies continue to face serious scalability issues due to their ever-growing blockchains. Thus, modern blockchain designs began to prune old blocks and rely on recent snapshots for their bootstrapping processes instead. Unfortunately, established systems are often considered incapable of adopting these improvements. In this work, we present CoinPrune, our block-pruning scheme with full Bitcoin compatibility, to revise this popular belief. CoinPrune bootstraps joining nodes via snapshots that are periodically created from Bitcoin's set of unspent transaction outputs (UTXO set). Our scheme establishes trust in these snapshots by relying on CoinPrune-supporting miners to mutually reaffirm a snapshot's correctness on the blockchain. This way, snapshots remain trustworthy even if adversaries attempt to tamper with them. Our scheme maintains its retrospective deployability by relying on positive feedback only, i.e., blocks containing invalid reaffirmations are not rejected, but invalid reaffirmations are outpaced by the benign ones created by an honest majority among CoinPrune-supporting miners. Already today, CoinPrune reduces the storage requirements for Bitcoin nodes

Author

Matzutt, Roman; Kalde, Benedikt; Pennekamp, Jan; Drichel, Arthur; Henze, Martin; Wehrle, Klaus

Published

2021

Language

EN