i'm skeptical that such a system could work for bitcoin unless they changed up the structure of bitcoin blocks to include some type of utxo set commitment inside each block. but i guess if you did that, maybe it could work.
because the way it is right now, an individual block doesn't really tell you anything about what the existing utxo set is or any of its properties. that would need to change somehow.
Nah. That could be side information computed as part the proving process, it doesn't need to be part of the block commitment.because the way it is right now, an individual block doesn't really tell you anything about what the existing utxo set is or any of its properties. that would need to change somehow.
E.g. prove "block hash x with resulting utxo state hash xu is a valid successor to block y with utxo state hash yu".
And each block commits to every prior utxo set state by committing to the history of all blocks before it. So, for example its possible to construct a proof that says "output 0xDEADBEEF:01 is a member of the utxo set at height 1000 of this chain with height 1001 hash Y" its just that the prover must process the whole chain up to height 1000 while constructing the proof. The prover might be more efficient with an optimized commitment structure but it isn't necessary. You can produce a proof for the output of ANY program. If a program can validate it, a proof can be provided.
it seems like such a huge problem for such a simple seeming thing. if everyone could just agree on the same utxo set at a certain block height they could jettison everything that came before that. kind of
and then it would be like restarting the entire blockchain from a new genisys block the only difference would be there was an existing utxo set not an empty one...that's how you solve the storage problem.