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Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2012 22:36:13 +0200
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From: Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net>
To: Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com>
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Cc: Bitcoin Dev <bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net>
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Bootstrapping full nodes post-pruning
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> If we wanted to go the route of shipping pruned chains I'd prefer to
> have a deterministic process to produce archival chains

Yeah, that sounds reasonable. I mean, I can't see why pruning would
not be deterministic. So if you download a binary that contains a
pre-indexed and pruned chain up to block 180,000 or whatever, you
should be able to blow away the data files and run with
"-syncto=180000 -prune", then check the hashes of the newly created
files vs what you downloaded.

Unless BDB has some weird behaviour in it, that shouldn't require any
additional effort, and anyone could set up a cron job to verify the
downloads match what is expected.

Even if a more complex scheme is used whereby commitments are in the
block chain, somebody still has to verify the binaries match the
source. If that isn't true, the software could do anything and you'd
never know.