Peter,

This sounds like a _very_ good idea for a desktop client, and probably acceptable to users so long as we take available disk space into consideration, and only ever use a fraction of it.

Will you implement this?

-wendell

grabhive.com | twitter.com/grabhive

On Jul 17, 2013, at 12:58 PM, Peter Todd wrote:

> So what's useful about that? Basically it means your node starts with
> the same security level, and usefulness to the network, as a SPV node.
> But over time you keep downloading blocks as they are created, and with
> whatever bandwidth you have left (out of some user-configurable
> allocation) you download additional blocks going further and further
> back in time. Gradually your UTXO set becomes more complete, and over
> time you can verify a higher and higher % of all valid transactions.
> Eventually your node becomes a full node, but in the meantime it was
> still useful for the user, and still contributed to the network by
> relaying blocks and an increasingly large subset of all transactions.
> (optionally you can store a subset of the chain history too for other
> nodes to bootstrap from) You've also got better security because you
> *are* validating blocks, starting off incompletely, and increasingly
> completely until your finally validating fully. Privacy is improved, for
> both you and others, by mixing your transactions with others and adding
> to the overall anonymity set.
> 
> In the future we'll have miners commit a hash of the UTXO set, and that
> gives us even more options to, for instance, have relayed transactions
> include proof that their inputs were valid, allowing all nodes to relay
> them safely.