blockchain

If you’ve been on the Internet the last few days, you’ve probably heard of Libra, Facebook’s new venture into blockchain technology. Their goals are far-reaching — “to enable a simple global currency and financial infrastructure that empowers billions of people”. In this article, we review their recently released white paper.

In modern blockchains, if some node wants to verify a block, it either has to be a full node storing the whole network state, or it has to continuously ask some remote storage for various parts of it. Each of these solutions possesses either inconveniences (storing 100+ GB of data) or risks (the storage forging the data it sends you).