Has there been any thought into bitcoin cash supporting UTXO snapshots? We may eventually get to a point where forgetting transactions from very long ago will have basically 0 loss in security.
Trustless UTXO snapshots are possible, just like you verify the last x years of proof of work being valid. The first 2 years of bitcoin could easily be forged by anyone at this point due to how weak the proof-of-work is back then compared to now. Verify enough to-date proof of work from a UTXO hashed starting point and your golden. Merkle trees help accomplish this.
This can also be accomplished without neither a soft-fork or hard-fork, just an additional feature. Every 3 months nodes would be required to create a compressed UTXO set with a hash, which can then be re-transmitted to other nodes for them to resync from and verify themselves. New node operators could specify how far back they want to grab a UTXO set from.
Bitcoin has played with check-pointing before, this has exact same security requirements.
Benefits: Much easier to sync up a full node which will have the same resulting UTXO set as "historical nodes" which have the full history at minimal security loss. Much less bandwidth leeching on the network and "wasted" CPU cycles verifying transactions which have small amounts proof-of-work behind them relative to the recent last 2 or 3 years.
Cons: Really none, especially if SHA256 hashes per second keep increasing exponentially.
Thoughts?
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/9pzyqn/bitcoin_cash_and_utxo_snapshots/
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