March 2018
Beginner to intermediate
656 pages
20h 9m
English
Content preview from Mastering Blockchain - Second Edition
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
Start your free trial
Storage plane
The storage plane is the third layer, which stores the ledger. Issues in this layer revolve around the need for each node to keep a copy of the entire ledger, which leads to certain inefficiencies, such as increased bandwidth and storage requirements. Bitcoin has a method available called pruning, which allows a node to operate without the need to keep the full blockchain in its storage. Pruning means that when a Bitcoin node has downloaded the blockchain and validated it, it deletes the old data that it has already validated. This saves storage space. This functionality has resulted in major improvements from a storage point of view.