whitebeard wrote:It seems to me there might be a simpler approach to this than changing fees and slapping on band-aids. Pretty soon it won't be a block-chain; it'll be a bandage-chain. What we need to do is remove the need for people to consolidate all their tiny transactions, by doing it for them automatically.
Couldn't we add a feature to the wallet that automatically consolidates all extant inputs to a particular address if there are any inputs of at least X days of age into one transaction, by adding a marker to a new block that effectively authenticates the presence of all these inputs from previous blocks, so there is no need to search further back down the block-chain for authentication of the inputs. Thus decreasing the data size of any future outputs from that address. I would make it so that it would, also, automatically re-consolidate the returned change inputs by adding them back to the address from which they originally came without having them travel the block-chain again.
To take this further, it effectively would be an auto-pruning measure, because at some point you would never need to go back to the genesis block for authentication.
This, ultimately, may or may not have an effect on difficulty, so care needs to be taken that we do not introduce inflation into the economy.
phelix wrote:Privacy issues was the first thing to jump to mind. Probably others. I would be happy to further discuss this suggestion but please create a separate thread for it.whitebeard wrote:Why? Please expand on this. What is your rationale?Automatically consolidating is bad. Pruning is good and we (Domob) are working on it but it is difficult. Help with coding is appreciated.
I don't understand how placing a token into the blockchain affects my privacy any more than creating a transaction does. It would not publish any more information than is already freely available on the blockchain (the address involved and the amount of coin belonging to that address). Basically, what I am proposing is making a new creation point for the involved coins similar to what happens when new coins are mined. Once verified and approved by the community (i.e. miners [&other wallets?]) the historical links to those coins can be severed.
The advantage of auto-consolidaton for the network is generally smaller outputs from any given address. The disadvantage is an increase in change-making transactions. However, the two may balance each other as far as net effect on difficulty/network-load.
I am not sure if the best route would be to destroy the coins and recreate them (functionalities that already exist and seems like the logical choice) or create a whole new algorithm.
Regardless of consensus on auto-consolidation, something similar to this may be the answer to the pruning issue. The issue, then becomes one of how to get a genesis block on which new clients are dependent. I propose a historical summary generated by consensus of 'the community' either at regular intervals or on a floating interval based on recent activity on the network The summation lines would start from coin creation and jump to their current state eliminating all the data in between. This of course depends on integrity of the prior data which must be verified before the "genesis summary" is implanted and truncation of the blockchain occurs.