[Cryptography] actual journalism, was LRB article, Satoshi's Trump Card

Jameson Lopp jameson.lopp at gmail.com
Wed Jul 5 05:05:42 EDT 2017


On Tue, Jul 4, 2017 at 7:31 PM, Ron Garret <ron at flownet.com> wrote:

> [Removing cipherpunks from the cc list since I am not a subscriber]
>
> On Jul 3, 2017, at 1:59 AM, James A. Donald <jamesd at echeque.com> wrote:
>
> > On 03/07/2017 4:31 PM, Ben Laurie wrote:
> >> Confused by this - Merkle trees inherently don't grow to enormous depth.
> >
> > The bitcoin hash chain grows to enormous depth, and arguably it is a
> Merkle tree that testifies to all transactions everywhere that ever taken
> place in bitcoin.
> >
> > If you say it is not a Merkle tree, then fine.  A scalable crypto
> currency has to employ a Merkle trees instead of whatever we call the thing
> that Bitcoin uses.
>
> The original bitcoin paper by Satoshi (https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf)
> explicitly dealt with this issue in section 7, and specifically says:
>
> "Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under enough blocks, the
> spent transactions before it can be discarded to save disk space. To
> facilitate this without breaking the block's hash, transactions are hashed
> in a Merkle Tree [7][2][5], with only the root included in the block's
> hash.”
>
> What happened?
>
> Pruning has been an option available in Bitcoin Core since version 0.11 (2
years ago) https://bitcoin.org/en/release/v0.11.0


> rg
>
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