Ask HN: Smallest blockchain?

5 points·ateesdalejr··5 comments

Are there any cryptocurrencies that focus on small blockchain size? For example bitcoin's blockchain is more than 100GB this might be a bit too large for someone who only has say a 256GB hard-drive. Are there any cryptocurrencies that focus on having the most space efficient blockchain? Say, maybe a few GB?

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The MimbleWimble design [1] allows inputs to be cancelled against the outputs they spend, with no loss of security. Essentially, the entire blockchain history may be collapsed to a single mega transaction, with all coinbases as inputs and the UTXO set as outputs. In his recent talk [2], Andrew Poelstra discusses the achievable savings relative to the bitcoin blockchain.

[1] http://mimblewimble.cash/20160719-OriginalWhitePaper.txt

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovCBT1gyk9c

They don't need to 'focus' on that, since there are various strategies to achieve it without redesigning the blockchain as a whole. For example, there are light clients [1] you can run which only download part of the blockchain and still provide some guarantees.

[1]: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Light-client-protocol

The only problem I have with a light client is the fact that it is nigh to the impossible to do any sort of mining at all.

I'm curious, why is it impossible? I don't know much about mining.

The hole raiblock is 1.7g for 5millions + transactions

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