I stumbled upon this site today: https://hornetnode.org/overview.html.
It’s an experimental Bitcoin client that has a custom, super-fast UTXO database. Early tests indicate it's around 10 times quicker at syncing the blockchain (without validation) compared to Bitcoin Core!
This got me thinking... could this really be a solid alternative? And will it let us use Bitcoin on-chain a lot faster than what we have now?
I remember i checked this node client from different discussion. But just like last time, it seems they haven't released the code or share any progress.
This part is rather interesting, since UTXO growth makes initial sync on older/slower feels much longer. If/when it comes out, someone should compare how well it perform compared with Bitcoin on SSD with low RAM and HDD with high RAM.
I wonder how would the the author compare their implementation with https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin-consensus. AFAIK it's only dedicated library/module for Bitcoin consensus out there, since other full node software doesn't seem to provide such thing.
No code? What a shame. I was going to say this could be a client that gets maybe 5% of the total market share of nodes, but without published source code, nobody is going to run this software ever.
It doesn't really matter that the MIT license used by Core allows you to keep your modifications proprietary, thus allowing them to do such a thing, if you are changing the codebase of a software that is literally money to people.
Actually both the source code and binary/software aren't released, so we can't even try or test it. The paper show some contain code snippet, as example of their code structure that promise few things such as being modular.