Looking through the entire Bitcoin blockchain is slow

[paulkernfeld]

Is there a way that we can make it faster for blockname to start up? Loading the entire blockchain takes a long time, which will probably slow down adoption. Also, since the max block size is likely to be increased soon, this problem is only going to get worse.

Perhaps we could take advantage of the fact that DNS is read-heavy and write-light? I think I've created domain names maybe four times in my life, but I use DNS more like... several times a minute?

For example, we could only allow writes into blocks of predetermined height. If you only allowed writes into block heights that were a multiple of 1000, you would get a 1000x speedup, which is pretty awesome! The disadvantage is that people would need to wait up to a week to write new data.

Perhaps you could do even better by looking through the blockchain in a predetermined, nonlinear pattern.