GCBlock: A Grouping and Coding Based Storage Scheme for Blockchain System

Abstract

To achieve the tamper-proof, reliability and traceability of transactions in a trustless environment, the blockchain requires each peer node to store the whole global ledger. However, as transactions keep increasing over time, the storage cost of each node increases. In addition, many schemes have been proposed to boost rapid transactions which will even lead transactions to grow explosively. The problem of storage is becoming one challenge of blockchain since the storage overhead of each node increase rapidly. Reducing the storage overhead of each participant is very urgent and worthy. In this paper, we present GCBlock: a grouping overlay network storage scheme for the blockchain which can reduce the storage overhead of nodes and cut the whole storage cost of the blockchain greatly while keeping the underlying protocols. In our scheme, we try to group the nodes according to their physical fuzzy distance to reduce the overall delay when tracing. We set rules of autonomous check to deal with evil behavior within the group. To further enhance the stability of our scheme, we propose the transcript fractional repetition code which is newly constructed based on the fractional repetition code to encode data. Finally, we make a comprehensive evaluation of GCBlock and the results show that it is workable and reasonable.

Keywords

• Blockchain
• distributed storage
• overlay network
• network coding