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A proof-of-concept for stateless Bitcoin nodes, based on theaccumulator crate. Provided totally as-is and probablywill not be maintained, though the authors of this simulation are more than happy to answer yourquestions.

See theaccumulator repo forgeneral setup instructions.

Justcargo run.

The concept for this simulation is adapted fromBatching Techniques for Accumulators withApplications to IOPs and Stateless Blockchains (Boneh, Bünz, and Fisch 2018)[Link].

We envision three kinds of actors in a stateless Bitcoin ecosystem (some familiarity with Bitcoinand accumulators is assumed):

• Miners aggregate transactions into blocks, establish consensus on each new block, and storethe current chain state in an accumulator (a constant-size aggregation of the UTXO set). Minerspublish updates to this accumulator value.
• Users issue transactions from the UTXOs in their possession. When a user presents a UTXO to bespent, they must also present the accumulator witness for that UTXO (proving that the UTXO isunspent with respect to the current accumulator value). In common terminology, users can beunderstood as light clients.
• Bridges manage witnesses for a number of users, offering these users a liveness guarantee sothey don't miss accumulator updates. There are efficient procedures to update a batched set ofwitnesses, and users can query their individual witnesses on-demand.

In our simulation, each user issues a single transaction per block, and miners cut blocks everytmilliseconds. There aren users assigned to each ofm bridge nodes, for a total ofn * m usersin the system. Although we includer different miners in the simulation, one of them is alwayselected leader to establish consensus.

For more details, please review our code.