I was asked the question what is the status about the so-called Simplified Name Verification (SNV) that is the corresponding to Simple Payment Verification (SPV) in bitcoin.
@jude was so kind to explain to me what SNV is and where blockstack is. I wanted to share it here to have a referable source:
Given a consensus hash you trust, you can use it to prove that a previous transaction was included in it in O(log n) time. This is because a consensus hash is the root of a merkle skip-list over the set of transactions the node accepted. Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to calculate the “weight” of a given consensus hash, so you can’t tell the difference between two different consensus hashes from different chain histories (but this will change in proof-of-burn mining).
There’s not a javascript implementation yet, but there is a Python one in the Blockstack Core repo (see
blockstack/lib/snv.py)
Proof of burn gives you a way to weight consensus hashes by the total amount of BTC that was burned by the transactions they represent (and, by proxy, the total amount of work that went into producing that chain history)
So with the launch of stack tokens we are getting there.