This ignores the point I made.
The fastsync is about UTXOs, wallets (and SPV) is about transactions.
You can’t just replace one with the other and pretend you can get SPV proofs that are meant for transactions, for utxos.
If you think you can, please build it. Prove me wrong.
Until then, I don’t think fastsync in consensus makes much sense. Too high risk of changes needed (by hardfork) to make the normal usecase work.
Yes, I was inaccurate, sorry, let’s try again:
Bootstarting historyless SPV-serving nodes:
I agree.
This is in line with Satoshi’s “Nodes will be server farms”.
Of course, the corpos and operators running these farms will not be willing to pay the costs of maintaining all the tree back to genesis for no compensation.
But I also think that it is important that some independent/hobbyist/academic/subsidied by government nodes remain, so it can be verified at any time that somebody is not cheating and supplying clients with fake history for some nefarious/for-profit reason that we cannot imagine today.
Here’s some empirical evidence of there always being some copies of history: people seed Torrents, r/DataHoarder exists.
If Bitcoin Cash grows, having an archival node will come with big bragging rights.
Yes, also this is not going to happen in the next 20-30 years, because technology is still following Moore’s Law.
Hard drive space and Internet connection speed is rising geometrically. Much faster than adoption of BCH can probably proceed (that is, assuming no Black Swan-type scenario happens that causes billions of people to suddenly want to use Crypto).
I think the crux of the problem is the details of this step
A client that just synced the UTXO set could in theory connect to every known Electrum server and issue blockchain.transaction.get and blockchain.transaction.get_merkle for each UTXO to achieve it. (No I don’t think this is a good solution)
Or, since the block height of each UTXO is known, set the appropriate bloom filter and request merkelblock for specific block from nodes with full history. Rinse and repeat for each UTXO.
Or the node gets the data from a side-channel not specified in this spec.
One key point is that those transactions and proofs are not contained within the snapshot and we are still dependent on someone being around and serving it in some way.
To summarize:
For a node to be able to fully validate everything (i.e. being a “full node”) from the point of the UTXO snapshot nothing more is needed. This is the problem solved by this CHIP and a miner validated commitment in a future CHIP could make this fully trust-less.
For a node to able to serve history (transactions and proofs) from the point of the UTXO snapshot additional data needs to fetched and validated. To me this seems like a separate CHIP if we would like a standardized way of doing it.
So,
you just turned the small utxo set download into “download all full transactions that still have at least 1 unspent output in them”.
Maybe good to re-do the math (how big the download is) and the fastsync chip based on this new approach.
I suspect it changes a LOT.
When someone implements that, so we can be certain it actually works (not just theoretically), I’d love to see some discussion on how useful or viable it is for fastsync.
That’s only if you want to run your node as a historyless SPV server.
If you just need a node wallet, you don’t need the SPV stuff since you’ll have obtained the UTXOs from the snapshot and you’ll continue to maintain it as part of normal node activities.
You are not wrong, but for that usecase I suggest you just run an SPV wallet instead. Its massively less download for the same gain.
Also permissionless, trustless and actually works on-chain today.
and fully dependent on altruistic nodes that need to sync all history from genesis, and be ready to support such wallets queries.
yes,
so lets aim to make the fastsync actually capable of doing so. Because if we don’t then the vast majority of people that are indeed going to use SPV wallets can no longer use BitcoinCash as more and more fastsync nodes start popping up.
As I pointed out for some time, there is a logical error in your steps to get from the basic sync as the CHIP now states to actually being able to serve wallets. If you don’t believe me, then prove me wrong by building your suggestion in some proof of concept.
Arguing here makes no sense. This forum software is telling me I’ve commented enough on this thread. And, you know, its right. I’m not going to continue nicely trying to save you from the mistakes I see (for 18 months now) and you are not seeing.
Build it, saves us a lot of talk.
BLISS Presentation: Committing to UTXOs with Calin Culianu
