Gavin Andresen Drops A New Concept On Github for Bitcoin Cash

On January 2 one of the most well-known developers for the original bitcoin protocol, Gavin Andresen, contributed an idea to Github called “Storing the UTXO as a bit-vector.” Andresen has been active on Github for the past month as his contributions have been focused on general (Unspent Transaction Output) UTXO sets, but this particular idea is for the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network.

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Gavin Andresen has been lurking around Github for the past twenty-seven days, and on the second day of the new year, the developer contributed an idea for the BCH network. The concept Andresen called “Half-baked thoughts exploring a different way of implementing a fully-validating BCH node,” is an idea on shifting the storage of full transaction data to wallets. The developer explains the concept is to let every node in the new network store a bit-vector for every block which can be highly compressible even for gigabyte-sized blocks.

“This isn’t a problem today (the UTXO set easily fits in the RAM of an inexpensive server-class machine), but might eventually be at very large transaction volumes,” explains Andresen.

Initial block download is a problem today (it is annoying to have to wait several hours or days to sync up a new node), and this scheme could make it orders of magnitude faster by shifting the time when full transaction data is broadcast from initial block download to new transaction announcement.

‘Full-Node Operators Have the Right Incentives to Always Serve Correct UTXO Bit-Vectors’

Andresen believes the best option is to let “node operators hand-pick one or more semi-trusted nodes to get fast boot-strapping.”

“That is simple, and there are plenty of full-node operators who have the right incentives to always serve up correct UTXO bit-vectors,” Andresen adds.     

To ponder: is speeding up initial block download and saving memory at the cost of 2-3 times the bandwidth for new transaction announcements the right tradeoff? A gigabit per second connection is 75 gigabytes every ten minutes, so plenty of bandwidth for a few gigabytes of transaction data that translates into a gigabyte-sized block.

Bitcoin Cash Community Asks: Is Gavin Back?

The bitcoin cash community seems elated that Andresen has contributed a new idea for the BCH network. On enthusiast on the /r/btc Reddit forum writes, “this is the first official confirmation that Gavin is building for BCH, unless I’m mistaken.” Many BCH supporters recollected the Tweet Andresen published this past November stating;  

Bitcoin Cash is what I started working on in 2010: a store of value AND means of exchange.

What do you think about Gavin Andresen proposing the UTXO bit-vector idea for the Bitcoin Cash network? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

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