Block Summarization and Compression in Bitcoin Blockchain

Abstract

Blockchain is a distributed database that has advantage of being irreversible, transparent and decentralized. However, beside of its advantages, blockchain still face several challenges, one of them is scalability. One of the scalability challenges is increasing block size for every new transaction. The size of blockchain reached more than 180 GB. The block size will burden the node in conducting transaction verification. To overcome this problem, this paper has an objective to make summary blocks and compression for the summary blocks so that it can increase the space saving of blockchain and make it easier for nodes to verify transactions. The proposed method used for transactions whose entities can be transferred. This method combines block summarization algorithm and deflate compression algorithm. The proposed method applied to Bitcoin blockchain. Space saving is calculated by comparing the total size of original block with the total size of block that has been summarized and the total size of summary block which has been compressed. From the experiment results, the value of space saving for summary blocks is 22.318% and space saving for summary blocks that have been compressed is 78.104%.