Questions about Cardano... Blockchain Size? UTXO vs account?
I've been doing research on Cardano, already watched dozens of hours of Charles Hoskinson and still need to watch more, and I've been in crypto since the peak of 2018 (I ended up waiting for the bottom to buy though), and as a software engineer/computer scientist student I always like to try the tech, run the nodes and soon will start to try to deploy Smart Contracts. I know that in Ethereum one of the biggest hurdles is the fact that the blockchain size is always increasing and only people with big SSDs are able to run an archive node, and soon even the full nodes non archive will start to be out of reach for normal people...
From what I've seen, Cardano always tries to go for the most decentralization it can, so I do have to ask, what are the solution that the Cardano devs are thinking about implementing in the future to solve this node issue? Because the way I see it, it's a huge decentralization issue...
I've seen a few comments about this but nothing clear or precise, I would love to see Charles directly discussing it in one of his videos though... but so far I haven't found anything precise.
Also, I know BTC uses UTXOs and ETH uses accounts, and Cardano is going with the UTXO model, can someone ELI5 me the reason that is? I've seen someone talking about how in the UTXO model, people only need to know their own state while on the account balance model everyone needs to know everyone else's business, but I'm not getting it (prob missing some knowledge about the tech to get it), if someone can ELI5 me it I would be very thankful.
Posted Feb 18, 2021, 3:53 PM UTC
Charles talked about this and what kind of solutions there could be in one of his videos a long time ago. Unfortunately I can't remember exactly what he said or which video it was. At least they are looking into solving this. It's very likely that we will know more about this when we hear about Cardano Omega (roadmap for the next 5 years) in a couple of months. You could also try to ask about it in his AMA's.
IOG created Extended UTxO because, very simply put, they wanted the advantages of both UTXO and account based models without the disadvantages. This is a decent article, I think, about the advantages and disadvantages of UTXO and account based models https://medium.com/nervosnetwork/my-comparison-between-the-utxo-and-account-model-821eb46691b2.
One of the advantages of Extended UTxO is that it can scale more easily using sharding or L2 solutions like Hydra.
https://iohk.io/en/research/library/papers/native-custom-tokens-in-the-extended-utxo-model/
I always arrive too late to the AMAs so I haven't been able to ask him directly about the storage size :( I'll keep trying though... Ethereum long term it's going to be impossible to run imo, and with the increase in tps of ETH 2.0, I think it will only get worse and worse.
Thanks for the links! They explained it pretty well. The UTXO model with smart contracts seems much better then the account balance model... At least in a UTXO model we don't run into issues counting the supply (like Ethereum has atm)... We just need to count the UTXOs like Bitcoin nodes do.