Proof-of-property
Christopher Ehmke, Florian Wessling, Christoph M. Friedrich · 2018
The expansion of blockchain technologies from financial applications to other fields intensifies the problem of an increasing size of data stored in the blockchain. Unfortunately, new participants of the blockchain network are required to download the whole blockchain to gain an overview about the state of the system and to validate incoming transactions. Approaches like IOTA, SegWit or the Lightning Network try to solve the scalability issues of blockchain applications. Unfortunately, they focus on strategies slowing down the blockchain's growth instead of reducing the problems arising from a growing chain or introduce new concepts to oust the linear blockchain altogether. The approach proposed in this paper is based on the idea of Ethereum to keep the state of the system explicitly in the current block but further pursues this by including the relevant part of the current system state in new transactions as well. This enables other participants to validate incoming transactions without having to download the whole blockchain initially. Following this idea use cases can be supported that require scalable blockchain technology but not necessarily an indefinite and complete transaction history.