Bitcoin dht

Experimental Blockchain over DHT

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Disclaimer

This software and the associated DHT are still Proof Of Concept, and still under development.

A lot of work is needed to reach a real-world usable state.

PR are welcomed !

Background

Bitcoin is a quickly growing crypto-currency, gaining interest from the public by its capacity to emit some digital money, to transfer that money between wallets, to assure a certain anonymity in those transfers, and all of that without intervention of any bank or any other third party. (other than part of the network, ofc)

Bitcoin based blockchains all share the same characteristic: In order to reach a consensus, each and every nodes participating in the network have to keep a full copy of the blockchain. Even if this issue has been solved with light wallets and other trust-based protocol, a majority of the nodes need to keep a full copy of the blockchain in order for the network to keep working well. At this time, this blockchain is now 150GB big. (!) New arrivants have to wait at least one week before starting to actualy use their wallet.

A Decentralized Hash Table (DHT) is a form of network used to store some content in the form of key/value pairs. It differs from classical hash tables by its decentralized and distributed nature. In fact, each node participating in a DHT can fetch and store addressable content by key, as well as storing and serving a fraction of that hash table.

This experimental project try to avoid keeping all the blockchain, but instead prefers to store it in a DHT. This way every node has to keep a small portion of the blocks, depending on its own address in the DHT, the number of keys stored and the number of nodes participating in the network.

Even if the blocks are stored in a decentralized way, every node still have to keep some records when mining time has come:

• Every block's header, to validate a block when it comes for storage