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not sure pruning the blockchain is really possible. most of the earliest coins are not even spent and many are likely lost; this was something satoshi may not
by eof 13y ago
not sure pruning the blockchain is really possible. most of the earliest coins are not even spent and many are likely lost; this was something satoshi may not have thought through completely as pruning the blockchain was something he specifically talked about.. but many of the 'deep' coins are still unspent and anything 'above' them is unprunable.
- richcollins 13y agoWhat does above mean in this context? If its later tx involving those addresses then it isn't a problem because there are none?
- eof 13y agoWell the way to prune the blockchain is to store the merklehash only of all spent outputs if you can get a whole tree that has no spendable coins left. So if a bunch of old outputs all had their coins spent you can just prune that part of the tree and forget the blocks themselves and just store the merkleroot that represents the tree; but so many of the oldest coins are still unspent that there won't be a lot of benefit to this (I haven't done the analysis so this is somewhat a hypothesis). You actually have it backwards, it's aproblem precisely because there are not transactions involving those addresses other than the initial block rewards; pruning the tree would make those coins unspendable, which would be unfair. There are so many definitely-lost and likely-lost coins that I imagine at some point there will be a 'move your coins or lose them' mandate that will give people.. idk maybe 2 years or something to move coins to prove they aren't lost, and allow a large chunk of the blockchain to be pruned.