Rollerchain, a Blockchain With Safely Pruneable Full Blocks
This addresses scalability and efficiency issues for blockchain users and developers, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing Bitcoin-like systems.
The authors tackled the problems of blockchain storage growth, irrational node behavior, and trustless bootstrapping by introducing a new consensus protocol that allows safe pruning of full blocks, using proofs of storing past state snapshots.
Bitcoin is the first successful decentralized global digital cash system. Its mining process requires intense computational resources, therefore its usefulness remains a disputable topic. We aim to solve three problems with Bitcoin and other blockchain systems of today by repurposing their work. First, space to store a blockchain is growing linearly with number of transactions. Second, a honest node is forced to be irrational regarding storing full blocks by a way implementations are done. Third, a trustless bootstrapping process for a new node involves downloading and processing all the transactions ever written into a blockchain. In this paper we present a new consensus protocol for Bitcoin-like peer-to-peer systems where a right to generate a block is given to a party providing non-interactive proofs of storing a subset of the past state snapshots. Unlike the blockchain systems in use today, a network using our protocol is safe if the nodes prune full blocks not needed for mining. We extend the GKL model to describe our Proof-of-Work scheme and a transactional model modifications needed for it. We provide a detailed analysis of our protocol and proofs of its security.