(BlockBar) Co-author of the original paper underpinning bitcoin’s experimental lightning payments network, Tadge Dryja has released a new research paper. The paper is outlining a proposed scaling solution that he’s been working on for the past one year. Released on Monday, Utreexo is set to make the part of bitcoin full nodes called the “state” smaller and easier to run with the help of cryptographic proofs.
Dryja is known for being one of the most prominent technologists behind the “lightning” idea. Through it bitcoin can scale significantly if transactions are pushed to a second layer. Utreexo has a similar motivation and boils down to making bitcoin full nodes easier to run. To be noted, they’re the most secure way of using bitcoin.
The paper explains “As the number of users of the system increases, the UTXO set grows, and the resource cost of running a node increases. This has led to a progressively smaller proportion of users running their own node as more users rely on light clients or on [third] party nodes to inform them of the state of the network. Nodes using the accumulator need only store a logarithmically sized representation of the UTXO set, greatly reducing storage space and disk seek times.” Dryja has run showing the benefits of the scheme and the paper also reveals the results of simulations. According to him “Since January I’ve implemented more code and made the code public on GitHub, and gotten performance numbers for bitcoin mainnet download sizes.”
By looking at these numbers, a small catch is found there. The proofs data increases the network bandwidth load even though the storage requirements decrease overall. But the paper explains “In our simulations of downloading Bitcoin’s blockchain up to early 2019 with 500MB of RAM allocated for caching, the proofs only add approximately 25% to the amount otherwise downloaded.” Dryja has also noted the code as open source so developers can test out the idea if other developers want to take a look and pick it apart for themselves. He said “It’s not integrated into a wallet yet, which will still take some time, but the library is there for people to try out.”
Mayan MV is a passionate writer and cryptocurrency enthusiast. He currently serves as marketing strategist and contributor at BlockBar, based in Singapore. Mayan has started his career in blockchain technology about five years ago, and he has also written over a hundred articles that span across various fields.
