Transaction Dependency Model for Block Minimization in Arbitrary Blockchains

Abstract

Blockchains are distributed replicated state machines with a continuously increasing data storage underneath. The size of the storage can cause problems especially in limited IoT devices. In order to address that, this paper is based on the following ideas: While two state transitions could be replaced by a single one to represent the same state, this is not commonly done to reduce the blockchains storage size. To facilitate squashing of transactions independent of the application semantics a blockchain frameworks needs to know the interdependencies of transactions. In this paper we propose an explicit dependency model for any transaction in a blockchain. In this way a blockchain-framework can preselect connected transactions without business process semantics for a squash operation. These connected transactions are passed to the application for the squash to be performed. This ideally produces less transactions while achieving the same application state to be used for a reintroduction as new blocks within a fork for a smaller overall storage footprint.