An improvement proposal to UTXO developed by MIT professor, Thaddeus Dryja, may turn the bitcoin’s blockchain lighter. The acronyms stands for Unspent Transaction Output, name the field used to storage data about pending bitcoin on the web. Therefore, UTXO data works as an important system component to avoid double spending.
As an old idea in the bitcoin community, many enthusiasts has searching for a way to avoid the storage of UTXO. Dryja’s proposal draws attention to the elegant proof of concept presented, showing a method to implement this idea. Another crypto enthusiasts as Dan Boneh, Ben Fisch e Benedikt Bünz also collaborated in the development. Bünz recently participated in the development of monero’s protocol bulletproof.
The change implements a cryptographic proof to validate the UTXO, so the storage of that information is no longer necessary. On that way, the blockchain become so light that can run on a smartphone. Actually the weight of the bitcoin’s blockchain goes beyond 200 gb of data. However, the improvement will not directly increase the scalability because the speed to add block will still the same.
Benefits of the solution
The implementation of the proposal don’t need a hard fork, just a small update. Therefore, members of another cryptocurrencies communities, like ethereum, have paying attention to this solution. Recently the Blockstream rented the fifth satellite to improve the access to the blockchain. The project make possible the access even without internet, realizing the communication by SMS messages.
The proposal of professor Dryja was highlighted in an article published by the portal CoinDesk.
