Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] [patch] Switching Bitcoin Core to sqlite db

From: Gregory Maxwell <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2015 03:35:33 +0000

On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 3:04 AM, Simon Liu via bitcoin-dev
<[email-masked]> wrote:
> Given that UTXO storage is considered critical, it seems reasonable to

This sounds like a misunderstanding of what consensus criticial means.
It does not mean that it must be right (though obviously that is
preferable) but that it must be _consistent_, between all nodes.

> full node and keep up with the network, why not let those users with the
> resources to operate big iron databases do so?  It would be a good
> feature to have.

Because it provides no value, the data is opaque and propritarily
encoded with a compression function which we may change from version
to version, and because many of these alternatives are enormously
slow; enough that they present problems with falling behind the
network even on high performance hardware.

Moreover, additional functional which will not be sufficiently used
will not adequately maintained and result in increased maintains costs
and more bugs.