How the snapshot blockchain can be much more lightweight than Bitcoin?
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In the part about compressed storage in the whitepaper, my undestanding is that the only data that is stored in a block is the updated balance of accounts that have transacted since the last block. You explain that the scalability issue is addressed here by the fact that each block does not store the state of the whole snapshot. However, if at each second, all the updated balances are stored in the snapshot blockchain, how different is it than storing transactions data in a blockchain such as bitcoin? If alice sends bob 1 coin, bitcoin would store [tx: alice sent bob 1 coin] in a block ; vite would store [alice: 0, Bob: 1] in a block (supposing the previous balances were alice:1 , bob 0.) On top of that, at each second when there is no transaction in the network, a header of an empty block has to be stored in the chain.
Can you please explain how the snapshot blockchain can be much more lightweight than Bitcoin?
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@SwissVite I'm also interested to know more about it.
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Well, a transaction usually contains more information than sender, receiver and amount. If you send a transaction, you have to sign it with your private key, so there is a signature. Also, if this is Bitcoin, you still have to attach a script with your public key so others can verify the transaction. In addition, some other information such as miner fee has to be put into the transaction as well. Furthermore, in Bitcoin, a transaction may include multiple UTXOs other than a single account address, requiring more space to store.
Vite's snapshot block only contains "updated" states, making it lightweight apparently.
For the empty block you mentioned, Bitcoin will have the same situation if there is no transaction to package when a miner builds a block.
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@Allen In Vite, we have the option to include annotations/comment in tx. Seeing that it is kind of technically free to send a tx, what's to stop someone from uploading say a 100gb worth of data spread over millions of tx?
If it's possible, someone will do it. People already do it on Bitcoin (upload anti-Chinese material or random data) via OP_RETURN.
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Attaching comments in txs is not unlimited. Because the maximum quota that an account can have is 987,000 and 1byte comment will consume 68 quota, we can have this calculation: (987000-21000)/68 = 14205 bytes.
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@Allen Yes a comment has a maximum limit. And very small. But transactions are "free" so a user could send a million tx if they wanted to upload a million byte. I know this is not very likely but if it's doable, it will be done if someone really wants to do it.
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@plasmo yes, they did. just like other blockchains such as eos, tron, so much people send much meaningless data to the chain ervery time because of free. free is good, but also "bad"