Permissionless blockchains such as Bitcoin have long been criticized for their high computational and storage overhead. Unfortunately, while a number of proposals address the energy consumption of existing Proof-of-Work deployments, little attention has been given so far to remedy the storage overhead incurred by those blockchains. In fact, it seems widely acceptable that full nodes supporting the blockchains have to volunteer hundreds of GBs of their storage, to store and verify all transactions exchanged in the system. In this paper, we explore the solution space to effectively reduce the storage footprint of Proof-of-Work based blockchains. To do so, we analyze, by means of thorough empirical measurements, how existing full blockchain nodes utilize data from the shared ledger to validate incoming transactions/blocks. Based on this analysis, we show that it is possible for full nodes to locally reduce their storage footprint to approximately 15 GB, without any modification to the underlying protocol. We also discuss other client-side strategies to further reduce the storage footprint while incurring negligible computational overhead on the nodes.
翻译:长期以来,Bitcoin等无自由的阻塞链因其高计算和存储管理费用而受到批评。 不幸的是,尽管一些提案涉及现有工作证明部署的能源消耗问题,但迄今为止很少注意纠正这些阻塞的存储管理费用。事实上,支持这些阻塞链的完全节点似乎被广泛接受,即支持这些阻塞的完全节点必须自愿使用数百GB储存,储存和核查系统中的所有交易。在本文件中,我们探讨了有效减少基于劳动证明的阻塞储存足迹的解决方案空间。为此,我们通过透彻的经验性测量,分析现有的全链节点如何利用共享分类账的数据来验证即将进入的交易/区。根据这一分析,我们表明,完全节点可以将其本地储存足迹减少到大约15GB,而不会对基本协议作出任何修改。我们还讨论了其他客户方战略,以进一步减少基于工作证明的阻塞的储存足迹,同时在节点上产生微不足道的计算间接费用。