You can buy cheap computers for $20, maybe even use Raspberry Pi with a Hard drive as nodes.
Why can;t we have Sw to use up old Equipment to run as nodes,
I suppose we can, but how do we do it, using up spare bandwidth of our main PC.
Blocks are surely just hashed transactions, IE data.
Why can't a node only download, for example, only blocks that begin with 'A' as the first Alphabetic Char.
That would chop the Blockchain up into 26 Pieces.
52 if we use uppercase and lowercase.
And if we made it two Chars, it would chop the blockchain up 52 x 52 which is. 2704 so our 20Gb Blockchain is now a few Mb.
I suppose the reason why this wont work is because, If my node only has Blocks beginning 'AH' (for example ) the transaction we wish to verify may need to be verified against transactions contained in other blocks beginning 'VW' (for example) and so I can't verify that transaction because my node doesn't store those blocks.
So, I've chopped up the blockchain into much more manageable and decentralised portions,
but now I don't know where all the data is I need to verify my new transaction.
Is there a solution to this ?
