Segment Blockchain: A Size Reduced Storage Mechanism for Blockchain

• Published in: IEEE access Vol. 8; pp. 17434 - 17441
• Main Authors: Xu, Yibin, Huang, Yangyu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 2020; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Blockchain; blockchain storage; content distribution networks; Cryptography; distributed management; Distributed processing; edge computing; Nodes; Segments
• ISSN: 2169-3536; 2169-3536
• DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2966464

The exponential growth of the blockchain size has become a major contributing factor that hinders the decentralisation of blockchain and its potential implementations in data-heavy applications. In this paper, we propose segment blockchain, an approach that segmentises blockchain and enables nodes to only store a copy of one blockchain segment. We use PoW as a membership threshold to limit the number of nodes taken by an Adversary-the Adversary can only gain at most n/2 of nodes in a network of n nodes when it has 50% of the calculation power in the system (the Nakamoto blockchain security threshold). A segment blockchain system fails when an Adversary stores all copies of a segment, because the Adversary can then leave the system, causing a permanent loss of the segment. We theoretically prove that segment blockchain can sustain a (AD/n) m failure probability when the Adversary has no more than AD number of nodes and every segment is stored by m number of nodes. The storage requirement is mostly shrunken compared to the traditional design and therefore making the blockchain more suitable for data-heavy applications.