When hearing about scalability issues in Bitcoin and others, a common theme is the limited block capacity. What I immediately thought of is "why not replace the transactions with hashes ?", i.e., going from about 250 bytes to maybe 32, and if that's not enough, one could use Merkle trees. The actual transaction data would travel separately and mempool synchronization would have to be made tighter.
Now, I'm sure that I'm not the first to think of such an approach. Given that I've never heard such a thing mentioned, it must have been discussed and rejected early on. I would like to find out what problems were found with this kind of approach.
Would someone have a pointer to that discussion or a summary ?
Thanks,
- Werner
Maybe I misunderstand you, but what you describe sounds pretty close to what SegWit is already doing:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0141.mediawikiNot sure, but, Is it not the way Lightning Network works?
No, LN is using Bitcoin's smart contract capabilities to create what is basically a separate ledger between LN nodes.