The Mina protocol has made a cryptocurrency which has their entire blockchain size to always be ~22kb with their technology.
If possible, this should be implemented into any cryptocurrency such as Firo. One of the scalability issues with cryptocurrencies is the blockchain size growth and to keep it small for the little guy to run full nodes. And if the blockchain size will always be ~22kb or heck, under 1gb, you could easily allow full nodes to be stored on smartphones without worry about storage which could allow any Firo wallet user to be a full node operator at the same time.
I think Mina has solved the blockchain size scaling issue and Firo and other crypto projects should be greatful and take advantage of this within their own crypto projects.
Sounds extremely unrealistic as if you just take 2 Bitcoin addresses (sender and receiver) it is 68 bytes together. Plus you will have to include also info about amounts, timestamp and block number which will make it even less.
So if whole Blockchain will fit into 2.75kB (22kb) it will allow like 30 transactions in whole project lifespan?
It is simply not technically possible to have whole Blockchain 2.75kB (22kb) size.
Your missing the point. The blockchain can store unlimited addresses, transactions and blocks but it will always be small in size using the technology from Mina. The Mina blockchain is currently have over 140,000 blocks and counting and the blockchain size is ~22kb.
If you have many transactions or blocks it is impossible to have whole Blockchain in 22kb or 22kB unless there is only few transactions.
They simply don’t fit there.
Let say there will be 10k active addresses each address 55 characters, how you want to fit it in? Not to speak about timecode, fee info and amount.
For me it looks like you try to promote scam or coin which is based on lies here.
I am sharing this as a potential permanent solution for blockchain size scalability. I do not care if people buy Mina, just sharing its technology and suggesting using the technology in Firo.
First of all Mina isn’t a scam. The technology does allow verifying the state of the entire blockchain through the zk proof.
How it does this is through recursiveness.
When each new block in the Mina network is created, a new zero-knowledge proof is created. This proof includes the proof from the previous state of the Blockchain, which itself includes a proof of the state of the Blockchain before that, and so on. By using this property of recursion, these proofs can contain an infinite amount of information while keeping the proof the same size.
Afaik, it doesn’t offer privacy and all transactions are visible. Check out their explorer here. I’m also unsure how you can look up details of a transaction with only 22kB and whether there will be still some nodes that have to store the entire blockchain and database (such as the explorer). Will have to dig more into it.
I always thought the 22 kB claim is more of an advanced type of light wallet where yes you can verify the state of the blockchain through that proof but still need other data to get full details of a particular transaction. Will do a little bit of research and revert back.
Also there are huge drawbacks in performance.
Mina’s blockchain has as TPS of 0.5-1 and a 1hr finality time. This to me is a non-starter.
So I was right, there’s still a need for archival nodes for details of transactions. The proof only allows you to validate whether a transaction is valid or not.
IMO there are too many drawbacks of the Mina approach.
Slow performance (0.5-1 TPS)
Trusted setup
No privacy yet
We do have a light wallet approach that involves downloading the anon set that would would be something like 30 MB for 1 mil transactions which I think is okay. The main issue is how interacts with the transparent layer which requires Bitcoin type of approaches of which the most promising we find is Neutrino.
This is out of date and needs to be updated to Spark but Aram says it can be easily modified for Spark. While not as small as Mina, it probably has better performance and is privacy preserving.
Mina does not have privacy and i was not aware of the trusted setup.
With this 30mb anon set, does it only store balances for wallets that are using lelantus? Cause if Firo could have a “fallback” which will be only the wallet balances and not past transactions, this can be a solution to the blockchain size scalability were if a node runs out of storage for storing transactions it could delete the chain on the node and restore it with the latest “30mb anon set” and start over again. This will allow the little guy to mine Firo and keep it decentralized on storage.
@reuben I can see that my post may be misinterpreted. I wanted @trymeout to answer my question and then I would follow up with possibly 2 or 3 post of more questions that would eventually lead to the answer that you gave in you first post.
What I meant to say in my previous post was that Mina uses a sort of SPV, where instead of all the blockheaders it only uses 2. The previous blockheader and the current one. I could be mistaken about that. But that is what is comes across in my view.
@trymeout The size of the blockchain has already been significantly reduced. From 60 gig to 3.5 gig. My question to you is, are you mining? Are you running a masternode? If this is a problem that you are running into could you please provide some additional information on the setup that you are running?
I am not mining or running a masternode. However Firo, Monero or even Bitcoin core has not seen mass adoption. Picture a world were any cryptocurrency was used by a country or the entire world for everyday transactions. The chain will be growing rapidly by the day and within days or months the chain will be too large for the individual minders to run a full node, causing centralization were it requires data centers to run a full node. A small blockchain size is essential for any crypto to survive mass adoption and keeping the crypto decentralized.
If the chain is now 3.5gib that is great, but if Firo was used daily by millions of users, I would be surprised if Firo doesn’t grow by 3.5gib or less a day.
I always thought transactions should never be stored on chain or be stored on chain temporarily and only address balances should be stored on chain, but I am not sure if this is possible to do since blockchains are a ledger which tracks the history of each coin. The mina approach looks promising if it can be implemented into firo without compromising anything Firo has over Mina.
While I agree on this, it comes with massive tradeoffs.
0.5-1 tps won’t cut it.
The technique is interesting but not ready for primetime just yet.
Also as I mentioned someone still needs to maintain archival nodes.
