[Bitcoin-development] Pruning in the reference client: ultraprune mode

[Gregory Maxwell]

Pieter's performance numbers are a bit conservative if anything—
profiles on ultraprune[1] show that the reference client's wasting of
a lot of time in redundant serialization and hashing operations is
the major time sink. Once thats cleared up it should be quite a
bit faster

[1] https://people.xiph.org/~greg/ultraprune_profile.png

On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 12:52 PM, Pieter Wuille <pieter.wuille at gmail.com> wrote:
> Also note that this is not directly related to the recent pruning
> proposals that use an alt chain with an index of unspent coins (and
> addresses), merged mined with the main chain. This could be a step
> towards such a system, however.

In particular,  if the BDB indexing in ultraprune is replaced with
a hash committed tree structure who's root is committed in the
blockchain you then have a txout commitment scheme.
Ultraprune is most of the messy structural work for that. The
rest is mostly storage differences.