We know that Merkle trees are very important for blockchain projects, whether bitcoin blockchain or Ethereum blockchain, but there is a problem with this: it brings a lot of data. As of press time, the Bitcoin blockchain has reached 187 gigabytes of data, while the ethereum blockchain as a whole has surpassed 1 terabyte of data since May. Such a horrible amount of data is no longer affordable for ordinary people, and we urgently need another data structure.

RSA Accumulators, a data structure that functions like Merkle Trees — examples of schemes first proposed by Benjamin Wesolowski and later, At the Scaling Bitcoin conference on 5 October, Benedikt Bunz, PhD of Stanford University (and one of the authors of the Bulletproofs technology proposal) also presented the idea of replacing Bitcoin Merkle trees with such data structures, for those interested in the video:

According to Benedikt’s idea, with this data structure, we can compress the UTXO data set of the Bitcoin blockchain to 1.5KB… As melon eaters, we might be very excited.

But if it’s really that amazing, consider the work of Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, who these days happens to be working on a Plasma solution that applies this data structure to Ethereum (after all, ethereum’s main chain is relatively operable).

According to his calculation, the annual Plasma chain data of 2.5GB can be compressed to 3.6MB by using this data structure, with an astonishing compression rate of 99.856%. It can be seen that the effect is positive, and we may consider using such data structure in future blockchain solutions.

The following is a translation of Vitalik’s argument, in the form of pictures because of the large number of formulas:

Vitalik has further research, but interested readers can visit this link: https://ethresear.ch/t/log-coins-sized-proofs-of-inclusion-and-exclusion-for-rsa-accumulators/3839

Reference: the original author: https://ethresear.ch/t/rsa-accumulators-for-plasma-cash-history-reduction/3739 Vitalik Buterin compilation: free and easy like articles (translated) : Babbitt Information (http://www.8btc.com/rsa-accumulators)Copy the code