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Development Updates - July 15th

Extra transactions will cause extra bloat. Fortunately, space is cheap, and the blockchain isn't growing that quickly, so it's unlikely to become unmanageable any time soon. If it truly did get too large(keep in mind that bitcoin's blockchain is only up to about 20GB, which although annoying to download, is hardly significant for current hard drives), there are some things that could be done to try to lower it. The current block data compresses very well, and just for the sake of testing, I ran it through winrar and was able to decrease the size by more than 40%. Obviously that isn't a format you'd try to run in-line, but I'm sure you'd get significant gains with something else that you could use to directly save and load compressed data. Another possibility is blockchain pruning could be attempted to be done, although that would likely be controversial, as it would break the ability to verify all the way back to the beginning.
Also, one of the exciting opportunities that Masternodes provide, is that they can host the blockchain, decentralized, for lightweight users. I hope this feature happens soon. So only the masternodes, mining nodes and people who want to have a copy of the blockchain ever need have it. And yet it will still be stored in a decentralized fashion.

I'm also still wondering about what thelonecrouton said. Was he implying that with a muddy blockchain, we can't verify the validity of the coins (that they're true mined coins?) Or was he saying something else? I'm confused? Thanks!
 
Also, one of the exciting opportunities that Masternodes provide, is that they can host the blockchain, decentralized, for lightweight users. I hope this feature happens soon. So only the masternodes, mining nodes and people who want to have a copy of the blockchain ever need have it. And yet it will still be stored in a decentralized fashion.
You may have noticed that i am currently porting the electrum client to DRK --> https://darkcointalk.org/threads/darkcoin-drk-electrum-server.1648/page-2#post-12249

Doing so, i had the same idea of masternodes being "full nodes", whereas the "usual" client is only lightweight.
 
You know, I don't understand the seemingly arbitrary size limits of sending coin? I just sent some and wasn't charged a fee, then I send the same amount to someone else and I am charged a fee. Why is that? I'm not using Darksend.

forget the above, I just didn't notice the notification. I was charged a Transaction fee both times :)
 
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You know, I don't understand the seemingly arbitrary size limits of sending coin? I just sent some and wasn't charged a fee, then I send the same amount to someone else and I am charged a fee. Why is that? I'm not using Darksend.
Fee is depending on "complexity" and (binary) size. So if the second transaction had several inputs and the resulting rawtransaction was large, it is considered more complex than the first one (to me) which only had one input
 
Also, one of the exciting opportunities that Masternodes provide, is that they can host the blockchain, decentralized, for lightweight users. I hope this feature happens soon. So only the masternodes, mining nodes and people who want to have a copy of the blockchain ever need have it. And yet it will still be stored in a decentralized fashion.

This!

I disagree with the statement from fusecavator that the blockchain size isn't that important, because I'm on a slowish ISP and a day of Bitcoin-blockchain needs 30-60 minutes to download.

Masternodes holding the blockchain and slim clients would be a dream for me.
 
Using electrum as-is would render darksend useless as the client sends a list of all your wallet's addresses to a single electrum server. You'd need to ask one server per address to not connect your addresses with one another. That's massive overhead and doesn't seem practical.

edit: Having masternodes make a snapshot of all known addresses' balances every 1000 blocks that clients can download seems much more practical to me. You'd download the latest snapshot + up to 999 blocks after that or just the missing blocks if that means less data to download (e.g. if the blockheight is 19004 and you already have block 18950 in your database).
That'd give you the same privacy as using a full node wallet.
 
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Having masternodes make a snapshot of all known addresses' balances every 1000 blocks that clients can download seems much more practical to me. You'd download the latest snapshot + up to 999 blocks after that or just the missing blocks if that means less data to download (e.g. if the blockheight is 19004 and you already have block 18950 in your database).
That'd give you the same privacy as using a full node wallet.
Considering it's not good enough to simply give out the balances, as transactions have to reference their inputs, downloading a list of all unspent inputs every time a wallet is opened is likely far more data than the user wants to download, and could put too much stress on those serving it repeatedly. A better idea might be for full nodes to still maintain lists of all inputs, however have multiple smaller lists that one can request. If each address's inputs were stored in a list determined by something like: take_first_2_bytes(SHA256(address)), a user would be able to request the list containing the information they want without giving away which part of it they want, and only download small subsets of the full list.
 
The market is stupid now!
Wait a little longer ...:rolleyes:
You wait now, you miss the train. The next price hike (RC4) is not gonna be gradual. It is gonna be very fast. So fast that exchanges might experience lag/shutdown and when the market is back online the price will be too high already. Experience speaks ;) I wish i had more extra money to invest in DRK.

EDIT: This is what i was talking about. People now buying thousands of darkcoins at a time. We will not see gradual price hike. Price will teleport to the moon within hours: http://imgur.com/VDimo9s
 
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You wait now, you miss the train. The next price hike (RC4) is not gonna be gradual. It is gonna be very fast. So fast that exchanges might experience lag/shutdown and when the market is back online the price will be too high already. Experience speaks ;) I wish i had more extra money to invest in DRK.

EDIT: This is what i was talking about. People now buying thousands of darkcoins at a time. We will not see gradual price hike. Price will teleport to the moon within hours: http://imgur.com/VDimo9s

This post makes me happy! :)
 
Considering it's not good enough to simply give out the balances, as transactions have to reference their inputs, downloading a list of all unspent inputs every time a wallet is opened is likely far more data than the user wants to download, and could put too much stress on those serving it repeatedly. A better idea might be for full nodes to still maintain lists of all inputs, however have multiple smaller lists that one can request. If each address's inputs were stored in a list determined by something like: take_first_2_bytes(SHA256(address)), a user would be able to request the list containing the information they want without giving away which part of it they want, and only download small subsets of the full list.
Would it be possible to implement a torrent-like blockchain download, with both light and heavy clients participating? With a system like that, it would a) be more difficult to tell who wanted what part of the blockchain because everyone would receive different parts asynchronously and b) allow light clients to move recent blocks faster while full nodes could push the larger blockchain with the older transactions. Consider that a new wallet doesn't really needed the last two years worth of transactions, so a light client might have a creation time stamp and only load/store transactions newer than that time.
 
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