[Bitcoin-ml] Partial UTXO tree as commitment

Chris Pacia ctpacia at gmail.com
Wed Sep 6 14:24:16 UTC 2017


I tend to agree with all this. Assuming the ECMH is very cheap then this
would seem to have the low cost we're looking for. You did mention three
rolling hash operations per utxo. Couldn't the bucket hash just be
updated with each utxo (1 operation) and then the tree could just be
calculated once, as the last step when verifying the root? Not likely a
huge savings but it's probably not necessary to update the root for each
utxo.

Also, there would seem to be some issues to consider at the point when
the transaction count passes the boundary. We would likely need to
recompute all the buckets and take a performance hit for this one block.


On 09/05/2017 07:42 PM, Tomas via bitcoin-ml wrote:
> Thanks for your feedback Amaury. Answering reordered inline.
>
>
> On Tue, Sep 5, 2017, at 21:42, Amaury Séchet via bitcoin-ml wrote:
>> A few quick remarks:
>>  - If the sharding is based on a constant, the size of the proof or
>> the number of shard grows with the size of the UTXO set. A nice trick
>> is to grow the number of shard based on the square root of the size
>> of the UTXO set. Now number of shards and proof size both grow in a
>> sub linear manner with the size of the UTXO set.
>
> This constant is indeed what I proposed initially on slack, and your
> suggestion is exactly what I propose in my mail above with
>
> bucketsize =~  sqrt(txcount) * 64
>
> Such that both the bucket size and the bucket count growing at
> O(sqrt(utxo-size))
>
>>  - If we have a way to upgrade the way we compute the set (see first
>> point) I'd rather go for the simplest option at first.
>
> Clearly, using a set of hashes is more complicated than a single hash
> but only slightly as the more complicated parts are ensuring keeping
> sync between the set or hash and the UTXO set.
>
> The added complexity is mostly /reversed /when attempting to implement
> full node UTXO set syncing. Surely we want some form of chunking to
> sync 2gb and although we could use a snapshot for a single download,
> we can't easily implement full nodes to deliver a chunk of the utxo
> state of 2 blocks back. A bucketed approach solved these problems.
>
>> - This is maybe good enough, but far from perfect. I think we still
>> want to have a mechanism to update the UTXO set format no matter
>> what. There is a ton of work done on accumulator these days, so it's
>> not completely crazy to think that a better solution may be around
>> the corner.
>
> It's quite possible, which is why I added a version.
>
> Yet, I think we should not put too much faith in CS innovation here.
> I've learned that I should learn algorithms in order to learn how to
> build algorithms.
>
> As for the UTXO-set, the /primary/ use case requires fast updates and
> lookups. The secondary use case is these proofs. I offer an algorithm
> that cheaply amends the first use case with the second. LevelDB works
> quite well here for the primary use case, though RocksDB may improve
> it, possible reversal through a spent tree may improve its
> concurrency, and tweaked custom algorithms may also. Adding the proofs
> and full node syncing cheaply without effecting these efficient data
> structures seems like a big win.
>
> I don't think we should expect some new accumulator algorithm to be
> the perfect match for our UTXO set requirements. If you have a hunch
> for an algorithm that could either amend the primary utxo db in a more
> effective way than I propose, or replace the utxo database with
> something efficient enough for our primary use case and fulfilling our
> secondariness, I certainly would like to hear.
>
> As it stands, I believe an array of bucketed rolling hashes offers too
> much benefits over a single rolling hash just to pick the latter in
> the name of simplicity.
>
>
> Regards,
> Tomas
> bitcrust
>
>
>
>
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