Fountain Coding for Bootstrapping of the Blockchain

Abstract

Today's state of the art blockchains suffer from two major setbacks. The first among these, bootstrapping, is the introduction of new nodes into the peer-to-peer (P2P) network in the presence of adversarial nodes. It is crucial that new nodes are prevented from joining adversarial nodes to protect the integrity of the network. The second challenge that today's blockchains face is that of storage efficiency. Blockchains use replication to store the data (or ledger) among users. Users acting as full nodes need to store the entire ledger. As opposed to replication, coding techniques such as fountain codes can be utilised to create an efficient distributed storage system.