[coinculture]

You're probably right, we could have.

The primary reason to use our own is to support Merkle proofs of the state. For the Jepsen tests, it wasn't really needed, and may have been smarter to just wrap something else. But we didn't really reinvent any data storage, we just used goleveldb.

[sandGorgon]

Leveldb is great - but we are already seeing an explosion in system requirements of blockchains. For example, Monero is already at 25gb. What ends up happening is that people who are serious about this, end up having to port the data structures to a scalable solution. For example take a look at all the questions around "how do I make Bitcoin work with MySQL for larger websites" - https://www.google.co.in/search?q=bitcoin+mysql+site:bitcoin...

It would be so great if you guys could use a datastore that is setup for scale from the get go.