Blockchain Compression with Summary and Padding Blocks
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
The constant growth of blockchain ledgers, especially those with ephemeral data, poses challenges in resource management and performance degradation due to the accumulation of expired or non-useful data, which can impair the integrity and functionality of the network.
Innovation Solution
Implementing blockchain compression using summary and padding blocks, where obsolete blocks are removed and replaced with summary and padding blocks that maintain data integrity, allowing for efficient pruning of stale data while preserving the blockchain's integrity.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If blockchain ledger continuously grows to maintain integrity and immutability, then data integrity and security are improved, but storage resource consumption and network transmission burden increase significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts and removes obsolete or expired transaction data from the blockchain ledger while preserving the essential integrity information. By selectively removing non-essential historical data that is no longer needed for validation or security purposes, the system reduces ledger size while maintaining the core integrity guarantees of the blockchain through preserved hash pointers and essential block headers.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent applies different retention policies to different parts of the blockchain data structure. Essential elements such as block headers, hash pointers, and critical validation data are retained indefinitely to maintain integrity, while transaction payloads and other non-essential data are subject to expiration and removal. This local differentiation allows the system to maintain integrity where needed while reducing overall storage consumption.
2Loss of information
If all blockchain data is retained to ensure complete audit trail and immutability, then data completeness is improved, but query performance and update efficiency deteriorate due to large data volume
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts and removes obsolete transaction data that is no longer needed for current operations or validation. By eliminating expired data entries while preserving essential structural information needed for audit trails, the system maintains data completeness for relevant periods while significantly improving query performance by reducing the search space and data volume that must be processed.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent implements preliminary data expiration marking and organized removal based on predefined retention policies. By proactively identifying and flagging data for removal before it becomes obsolete, the system maintains optimal query performance without compromising the ability to provide complete audit trails for data within its retention period. This preliminary action prevents accumulation of unnecessary data that would degrade performance.
3Reliability
If blockchain is transmitted in full to new nodes to maintain network consistency, then network synchronization accuracy is improved, but network resource consumption and transmission time increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts and transmits only the essential elements needed for network consistency to new nodes, rather than transmitting the complete blockchain history. By identifying and transmitting only critical data such as recent blocks, essential validation information, and current state data while omitting obsolete historical data, the system achieves network synchronization with reduced transmission time and resource consumption while maintaining consistency guarantees.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent performs preliminary identification of which blockchain data is essential for network consistency before transmission to new nodes. By pre-processing the blockchain to determine the minimal sufficient subset of data needed for synchronization, the system reduces transmission overhead and time while ensuring that new nodes receive all necessary information to maintain network consistency and validate transactions correctly.
Data Source
AI summary
Technologies for compressing a blockchain. In some examples, the technologies include removing selected blocks within a blockchain, and replacing the selected blocks with a summary block and a padding block. Each block of the selected blocks includes data in a certain state (such as data in an obsolete state). The technologies can include generating the summary block and padding blocks according to the data in the selected blocks and an original root hash included in the selected blocks and other blocks of the blockchain. The generating of the summary and padding blocks can include generating a new root hash in the summary and padding blocks that only replaces the original root hash in the summary and padding blocks. The generation of the new root hash can be based on a part of a header of a non-selected block of the blockchain directly linked to an end block of selected blocks.