A scientist at the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, named Tadge Dryja, announced that he is working on a future solution to the Bitcoin scaling issue and make it possible to sync to the network using your mobile phone. The solution is called “uTreeXO”.
uTreeXO: A possible solution to Bitcoin scaling issue
The whole idea and goal of this concept initially was to find a way to deal with the rising demand of storage in order to be a part of the Bitcoin network. This brought developers new tools to deal with that and a new opportunity emerged to make it possible for phones to become nodes. While at the moment, it is required to download the full transactional history of the blockchain to be a part of the network, uTreeXO is in its testing stages and it works by validating information using a cryptographic proof instead of turning to the full ledger that needs to be stored.
How does uTreeXO work and what does it bring to the network?
Although there are many mobile full nodes, which are known as SPV clients, they require light wallets and trust other full nodes to have the valid data, which reduces significantly security. uTreeXO aims to achieve the same functionality and ease of use as an SPV client, but inherently have the same security as a full node. The technology underlining this advancement is know as an accumulator or bridge node.
In order for it to work, it will require the users within the network to support the software. It is widely known that these accumulators are very resource intensive and pretty much a hassle, Tadge Dryja managed to create a bridge node that doesn’t have these trade-offs and makes accumulators viable for the first time. This is where the result of full nodes no longer needing the full transaction history comes from, making it possible for mobile devices to be full nodes.
On the other hand, this would make more powerful computers unnecessary in the network, because having more than the required computational power will not bring any benefits. The whole idea of the team was to make it possible for Bitcoin nodes to be running on underpowered and old computers for wider adoption.