On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 6:09 PM, Thomas Voegtlin <thomasv1@gmx.de> wrote:

Le 09/04/2014 17:54, Gregory Maxwell a écrit :

> Sadly today Electrum requires more than a full node, it requires a
> number of large additional indexes over what a full node has and
> pruning is precluded. I don't think that increasing the resource
> utilization of the node is a good way to go there for the purposes
> expressed here. (not that electrum couldn't be used here, but not
> unmodified without the resource usage increasing route)
>

Electrum uses two large indexes:

address -> utxo

(patricia tree, aka "ultimate blockchain compression", see thread
started by Alan Reiner in the bitcointalk forum)

Thanks for the explanation.

Adding a RPC call for a "address -> utxo" query wouldn't be a big deal. It has been requested before for other purposes as well, all the better if it helps for interaction with Electrum.

Spent history would be involve a much larger index, and it's not likely that will end up in bitcoin

Wladimir