Utreexo beta out!

Bitcoin nodes that support Utreexo are out! Utreexo nodes do not store the UTXO set and instead store an aggrigation of the UTXO set that still allows it to verify all transactions. Because the UTXO set grows infinitely and is growing at a rate substantially faster than the blockchain is growing, its the biggest bottleneck for running a full node. If you use a Utreexo node and use the pruning option, your node will use a constant amount of disk space and memory usage forever.

To verify a transaction, the transaction must include additional information that proves that the UTXOs it uses are in the UTXO set. This means that instead of having every node store every UTXO, in a Utreexo world the owner of the UTXO is responsible for storing their UTXOs (and corresponding inclusion proofs). There are also bridge nodes that take a transaction generated by a normal bitcoin node and can create inclusion proofs for them that can then be forwarded to regular utreexo nodes.

Normal nodes can operate as they always have, but regular Utreexo nodes can only connect to other Utreexo nodes. Bridge nodes can connect to both regular Utreexo nodes and regular bitcoin traditional nodes.