"MIT Lightning Creator Unveils First ‘Demonstration’ of Bitcoin Scaling Tech" by Coindesk discusses Utreexo

An article by Alyssa Hertig published on July 28th, 2020. coindesk.com

“The infrastructure propping up Bitcoin might become easier for anyone to spin up and run.

Lightning creator Tadge Dryja has been working on a new design for a lighter weight Bitcoin full node, about which he first wrote a paper in 2019. Last week, he and a team of coders released a first version of the Utreexo software as a part of MIT Digital Currency Initiative (DCI), putting the idea of lighter nodes into working code. 

Full Bitcoin nodes act like financial security systems, validating Bitcoin blockchain transactions and protecting users from being tricked into thinking they received money that they didn’t. But they take up a lot of computing space and are quickly growing in size.

Since these nodes are the most “trustless” way of using Bitcoin, developers have long been trying to make them easier to use. It’s one of Bitcoin’s nerdy “holy grails.”