On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 1:04 AM, mlmikael <mlmikael@???> wrote:
> Am all with you that everything about LibBitcoin and BitcoinD is different
> altogether.

To be a little more detailed, I think the bitcoind implementation just
tracks the UTXO set when it does its block validation. The "unspent
funds" at any given point in time is obviously a much smaller working
set than "all funds ever", so they can get away with a lot less memory
usage. It's possible that libbitcoin could start tracking the utxo set
as well, allowing us to optimize our memory usage.

Maybe we could have two modules, a blockchain sync module that just
downloads and validates blocks, and a database module that indexes and
serves those blocks to clients. The download module would only need to
track UTXO's, giving it the same memory overhead as bitcoind. There
are currently no plans to do it this way, so I'm just throwing this
out as a thought experiment.

-William