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I've been doing some research into Bitcoin and the blockchain in general, and I've come upon a question that I can't find much of an answer to.
With my current understanding of the blockchain, I wonder if it would possible to create a "summary" block, and start the chain over? reducing its size while still maintaining continuity.
- The summary would have the hash of the last block in the old chain.
- For length calculation, it would be considered an extension of the old chain, and therefore its length calculated by adding its length to that of the old chain.
- I'm thinking that it would need to contain a summary of all accounts at the time of the summarization; essentially it would be the net of the old chain.
I found this question from five years ago, which helped a little bit.
This article states that the current size of the blockchain is over 100GB, and thats from 6 months back.
I'm just trying to learn, and this question has been bugging me for a little while. Is something like this possible?
To explore this idea, you might want to estimate how big the "summary of all accounts" data might be. – Greg Hewgill – 2017-09-06T03:13:00.570
Just using some estimation, according to this there are approximately 20,000,000 wallets with positive balance. A balance and address can be stored with 288 bytes [35 characters + 8 byte balance (assuming a double, could be larger)], lets be conservative and round that to 300 bytes if we include other information or need more decimal precision.
That leads to
20,000,000 * 300 = 6GB, which is large, but a significant reduction.