Main Page
Welcome to the official Mini-blockchain Project wiki. This wiki is an open source community project created to document and expand on the technical details of the mini-blockchain scheme as proposed in the official white paper and as implemented in the open source cryptocurrency called Cryptonite (the first alt-coin to use the mini-blockchain scheme).
Advantages of the mini-blockchain scheme
By replacing the full blockchain with a mini-blockchain and by using a self-contained balance sheet system (the account tree) for tracking the balance of non-empty addresses, it's possible to eliminate the need for storing long term historical transaction data and it provides an optimal level of compression, resulting in consistently fast network synchronization speeds.
As a result of this, the maximum block size can be made much larger and it's possible to increase the transaction bandwidth significantly without having to worry about blockchain bloating. The increase in block space also results in lower fees and more flexibility when it comes to issues such as micro-transactions and storing custom messages in the blockchain.
Although faster and more scalable, there are some weaknesses and attack vectors that we have to accept as trade-offs if we want all the advantages, but there's nothing which makes this scheme untenable in practice. This wiki will also cover some experimental ideas which are being developed, including the withdrawal limits system and the dynamic max block size mechanism.
