@ -241,7 +241,4 @@ As you can see from the table, while the block size increases rapidly, from 4 KB
Merkle trees are used extensively by Simplified Payment Verification nodes. SPV nodes don't have all transactions and do not download full blocks, just block headers. In order to verify that a transaction is included in a block, without having to download all the transactions in the block, they use an _authentication path_, or merkle path.
Consider, for example, an SPV node that is interested in incoming payments to an address contained in its wallet. The SPV node will establish a bloom filter on its connections to peers to limit the transactions received to only those containing addresses of interest. When a peer sees a transaction that matches the bloom filter, it will send that block using a +merkleblock+ message. The +merkleblock+ message contains the block header as well as a merkle path that links the transaction of interest to the merkle root in the block. The SPV node can use this merkle path to connect the transaction to the block and verify that the transaction is included in the block. The SPV node also uses the block header to link the block to the rest of the blockchain. The combination of these two links, between the transaction and block, and between the block and blockchain, proves that the transaction is recorded in the blockchain. All in all, the SPV node will have received less than a kilobyte of data for the block header and merkle path, an amount of data that is more than a thousand times less than a full block (about 1 megabyte currently).
Consider, for example, an SPV node that is interested in incoming payments to an address contained in its wallet. The SPV node will establish a bloom filter on its connections to peers to limit the transactions received to only those containing addresses of interest. When a peer sees a transaction that matches the bloom filter, it will send that block using a +merkleblock+ message. The +merkleblock+ message contains the block header as well as a merkle path that links the transaction of interest to the merkle root in the block. The SPV node can use this merkle path to connect the transaction to the block and verify that the transaction is included in the block. The SPV node also uses the block header to link the block to the rest of the blockchain. The combination of these two links, between the transaction and block, and between the block and blockchain, proves that the transaction is recorded in the blockchain. All in all, the SPV node will have received less than a kilobyte of data for the block header and merkle path, an amount of data that is more than a thousand times less than a full block (about 1 megabyte currently).
myarbrough@oreilly.com
10 years ago