Quote from: achow101 on October 30, 2017, 04:49:46 AM

Quote from: haltingprobability on October 30, 2017, 04:47:14 AM

Thanks for the feedback. Now that you've put it that way, it makes me think that this could be seen as a "full node with fast p2p join" protocol, where the small, latest suffix of the blockchain (+snapshot) is utilized to bootstrap the full node, but the full node operator could set an option to continue pulling in archival data from other archiving full-nodes after the blockchain suffix has been verified and the full node has gone online.

This idea is known as UTXO syncing and is something that has been proposed and though about for several years now. It is still being worked on and to enable UTXO syncing would require a fork. Enabling UTXO syncing requires that each block commits to the entire UTXO set. People are working on ways to securely and efficiently commit the UTXO set but all of that is still being researched.

Thanks for that info. Can you tell me who is working on this? Any links to working docs/discussions/dev-lists? In my opinion, this is the last technological hurdle that Bitcoin needs to jump before it is ready to scale to widespread adoption - that's why I care about this issue a lot.