A lighter weight Bitcoin full node is being designed by Lightning creator Tadge Dryja. The whole new full mode was set to be created since 2019 and the news came to light last week when Dryja and a team of coders unleashed the first look to the Utreexo software as a part of MIT Digital Currency Initiative (DCI). The phenomenal idea of putting lighter nodes into working codes was well received by the community.
Full Bitcoin nodes play the role of financial security systems; they are fully capable of validating blockchain transactions. In the same vein, full bitcoin nodes protect the users from any external attack to trick with false transactions and ghost funding.
The advantage of these lighter nodes is simple; they are easy to deal with. Developers have been working hard during this time to make them more secure and build a most trustable environment for these nodes to accomplish their mission.
Utreexo’s main goal is to intercept the size of the state of a full node, whose mission is to give birth to data about how much bitcoin is around and who owns it. Utreexo brings a new dawn of scalability technology for a currency like Bitcoin, making bitcoin nodes smaller, and easier to work with.
“A Still Unveiled Project”
The process has not been fully unleashed yet but the first version has received praises and some criticism based on skepticism. There is still a long path to walk by regarding this amazing project; users are currently able to use the nodes to settle up their finances.
Bitcoin full nodes hold every transaction ever made, clocking in at about 200 GB today. Full nodes can reduce the size of the transaction history to half a gigabyte, that’s incredibly low, Utreexo states that with this new cryptography is possible to create a replacement and set up a tiny cryptographic operation which takes much less storage and is easier to manage.
Looking Forward
Utreexo developers showed the total functionality of this wonderful idea; it can be possible, it can be a real product to be achieved sooner than later, but there are still some obstacles, such as bugs, to overcome. This will make nodes properly suitable for real funds.
The software is still on testnet (the bitcoin testing network) and it is not yet recommended to use it with real funds. There are still inefficiencies, lots of bugs, delays, updates that need to be arranged and fixed, but Dryja and the team are working fast. Therefore, progress and success are inevitable.
Utreexo soon will have to create compatibility with the already existent nodes on the network. There is a way to do this by creating modifications in the Bitcoin core, and this is a risk they have to face to succeeds, but this could be dangerous. Utreexo is “a significant re-thinking of how Bitcoin works, changing consensus-critical code,” Dryja writes.
By: Jenson Nuñez.
