That is essentially what we plan to do when we implement account tree pruning. Although it's not a high priority because the account tree will remain small for a long time and the block reward will remain high for a very long time. On a side note it's also possible to burn/recycle coins by sending them back to the coinbase account.

Yes I highly doubt Bitcoin will die due to a huge blockchain but it will become increasingly centralized because of it. Cryptonite enables more robust decentralization because the average joe doesn't have to spend days synchronizing with the network, it's much easier for people to setup full nodes and help make the network stronger. It also makes blockchain bloat less of a concern, the maximum block size can be higher if people don't need to download the full blockchain in order to become a full node. There is a huge debate happening right now in the Bitcoin community over whether the max block size should be raised to 20MB (requiring a hard-fork), and you'd be amazed how many people are against the idea because they think it will cause the blockchain to become too large too quickly. Cryptonite solves this problem by having a dynamic max block size which changes organically to accommodate the current rate of transactions, but since people only need the last 10k blocks to become a full node there is much less concern about blockchain bloat.

Even in such a scenario some nodes must hold the full Bitcoin blockchain. The Bitcoin wiki mentions this fact on the scalability page:


The core issue here is that even if you prune your Bitcoin blockchain, you still need to download the full blockchain when you first join the network, and that will require "archival nodes" as the Bitcoin wiki calls them. The network is more centralized in such a scenario because a high amount of trust is placed on those few archival nodes to supply the correct blockchain history.

The clever thing about Cryptonite is that new nodes don't need to download the full blockchain, there is no need for archival nodes to bootstrap new nodes. This is essentially due to the fact that transactions aren't linked together with scripts, the inputs and outputs simply point to other addresses. Since the account tree provides a summary of all address balances everyone can forget about old transactions.

When a new node joins the Cryptonite network all it needs is the last 10k blocks, the header chain, and the account tree. New nodes don't need to download and process every transaction that ever occurred and then build a compressed list of unspent outputs like they do in Bitcoin because the account tree is a pre-processed balance sheet which is cryptographically linked to the block headers.

This video I made some time ago discusses this topic in more detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eb0sAmQD0Dk

Yes that is pretty much correct. The most fundamental difference with Cryptonite is that old transactions can be forgotten forever because there is no such thing as spent and unspent outputs. All transactions become instantly spent the moment they are included in a block. So every single transaction can be forgotten by the network after a few weeks and new nodes only need the last weeks worth of transactions in order to become a full node.

There is a page on our wiki which discusses the type of withdrawal limits used in Cryptonite. It allows merchants to accept 0-conf transactions with a much higher level of confidence than would be normally possible. It's not a perfectly secure solution to the 0-conf problem but it's much safer than accepting a 0-conf transaction which isn't secured by a withdraw limit.

I have that problem also

Yes.Can you put in rar all files from app data except your wallet.dat. and upload?Then i will put in my app data with mine .dat?

I was just able to sync on win7 with 64 bit qt, but after several crashes and deleting contents of data dir once, but then after I was synced and closed qt window, it crashed again with something runaway error, but I was able to get synced with qt...

Is there any update to bitfreaks' encrypted web wallet? If yes, please re-post the link again.

This is an important component to represent cryptonite advantage as a decentralized mobile payment  service. Mini blockchain makes it possible to put everything in a browser, blockchain itself included.

yes exactly