Dietcoin: Hardening bitcoin transaction verification process for mobile devices

Distributed ledgers are among the most replicated data repositories in the world. They offer data consistency, immutability, and auditability, based on the assumption that each participating node locally verifies their entire content. Although their content, currently extending up to a few hundred gigabytes, can be accommodated by dedicated commodity hard disks, downloading it, processing it, and storing it in general-purpose desktop and laptop computers can prove largely impractical. Even worse, this becomes a prohibitive restriction for smartphones, mobile devices, and resource-constrained IoT devices. In this demo, we present an implementation of Dietcoin, a Bitcoin protocol extension that allows nodes to perform secure local verification of Bitcoin transactions with small bandwidth and storage requirements. This demo presents and benchmarks the main features of Dietcoin that are important for today's cryptocurrencies and smart contract systems, but are missing in the current state-of-the-art: (i) allowing resource-constrained devices to verify the correctness of selected blocks locally without having to download the complete ledger; (ii) enabling devices to join a blockchain quickly yet securely, dropping bootstrap time from days down to a matter of seconds; (iii) providing a generic solution that can be applied to other distributed ledgers secured with Proof-of-Work.