Cryptocurrency Privacy: Evolving... Zerocash (ZEC, ZCL, ZEN) vs All Other Coin

[George Violaris]

On 06/10/2017 8:31 AM, James A. Donald wrote:
> Generating this proof is inconveniently slow, and the data that has to 
> be stored is inconveniently on the fat side, but verifying it is 
> reasonably fast.

I believe the issue with this, such as in Bitcoin and any coin, is that 
the blockchain eventually grows to an enormous size. It's all nice when 
it's at around 200GB of data and it only takes a few days to synchronize 
to the network. But think about a blockchain that is 2 TB. That is not 
only a huge blockchain, that would be huge for a relational DB that is 
stored on central server or cluster. When databases get to that size, 
companies divide the schema. They'll either divide it per system, per 
department, per branch or however it suits them best. Then they'll use 
some sort of business intelligence tool to make sense of all that data.

Nodes need to be able to be useful by storing smaller chunks of a 
blockchain instead of having to store the entire thing, something like 
how sharing a bittorrent file works. The downside is that this may lead 
into centralization as full nodes would have an advantage, but it's not 
worse off than what it is now.

./gv