Dynamic Distributed Storage for Blockchains

Abstract

Blockchain uses the idea of storing transaction data in the form of a distributed ledger wherein each node in the network stores a current copy of the sequence of transactions (ledger) in the form of a hash chain. Storing the entire ledger incurs a high storage cost that grows undesirably large for high transaction rates and large networks. In this work we use secret key sharing, private key encryption, and distributed storage to design a coding scheme such that each node stores only a part of each transaction thereby reducing storage cost to a fraction of the original. When further using dynamic zone allocation, we show the coding scheme can also improve the data integrity.