Elden Tyrell [ARCHIVE] on Nostr: {"author":"Elden Tyrell","date":"2012-01-02T05:04:03","text":"Satoshi's paper ...

{"author":"Elden Tyrell","date":"2012-01-02T05:04:03","text":"Satoshi's paper mentions that storage requirements for the blockchain \ncan be reduced by deleting transactions whose outputs have been spent.\n\nIf I understand correctly, this technique can only be used for reducing \n*storage* requirements, not *bandwidth* needed for the initial chain \ndownload by a high-security client that doesn't trust any of its peers \n-- right?\n\nThe rule is \"trust the longest valid chain of blocks\". Part of a block \nbeing \"valid\" is that each transaction's inputs are unspent and their \nsum exceeds the transaction's outputs unless it is a coinbase. This \ncannot be verified for \"stubbed out\" transactions -- they have outputs \nbut no inputs, and aren't coinbases. So a paranoid client booting up \nfor the first time needs to be given an un-stubbed chain, right?\n\nOf course, if a client decided to accept a stubbed blocks only when the \nsum of the difficulties in the blocks after it exceeds some number N, \nthen attacking it could be made very expensive by picking a large \nenough N.\n\nPlease let me know if I have misunderstood something."}