Abstract
In recent years, the Bitcoin blockchain has gained wide attention due to its decentralization and transparency. With the extensive adoptions of the Bitcoin blockchain, its size has reached to 408 GB so far and is still growing, which significantly degrades its scalability. Besides, the bootstrap process for newly joining nodes is quite slow and costly due to the huge communication and computation overhead. In the paper, we devise a full-fledged solution that not only improves the scalability of the Bitcoin blockchain, but also accelerates the state synchronization of the Bitcoin blockchain. We adopt IPFS (Inter Planetary File System), a trusted off-chain storage platform, to amortize the storage pressure of the Bitcoin full nodes. Moreover, we present snapshot blocks to enable secure and fast synchronization of UTXO (Unspent Transaction Outputs) set instead of scanning again from the beginning of the Bitcoin blockchain. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments. The results show that, compared with the official Bitcoin core, the scheme reduces the storage space for Bitcoin full nodes by 97.8% and the synchronization time of new nodes by 81.5%, without breaking the protocols of existing system.
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