Bitcoin Forum

Last time I recalled it was at like 52 or something.
https://i.imgur.com/FouVhPF.jpg

Whats the point of downloading the entire source or the heavy hard drive hitting wallets and not just the light wallets ? Is it because that allows you to host a node ?

Then it's been a year since the last time you looked at it. It hasn't been since late 2015.

If the blocks are all full, then the blockchain grows by about 52.6GB per year.  Empty blocks and blocks that are less than 1 MB in size occur frequently, so the actual growth over the past year has been more like 39GB.

It still costs under $50 to store the Blockchain in full. I don't see it ever being a big deal. + not everyone has a node so doesn't technically need it  ;D we'll see a bigger Blockchain if the block size is raised and more transactions start going through.

It's growing in a quick fashion, that's right. But I am still happily running a full node on my home computer. Currently I am in fact running out of space on my 1TB drive, but will upgrade to 3TB very soon. I however wonder what is the quickest way to work. Is it better to copy the entire blockchain that I currently have on my computer, or should I download everything from scratch?

At this rate it will a terabyte by 2020 :D

No need to download from scratch. Well, fully download I mean, no need. You can follow the below guide. And am sure there are other guides too.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1310261.0

I do indeed have a backup of my bitcoin to a second hdd. Depending what you need to do etc.

to small ... boya ... !

https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-850-EVO-2-5-Inch-MZ-75E2T0B/dp/B010QD6W9I/

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img633/6498/RAReuD.jpg


Nothing is too big for the blockchain.

Dat price is too big for the blockchain.

in 2 years, no.

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img903/5932/Suzhvq.jpg

You aren't very good at maths are you?

The current size is less than 100 GB.

The current rate of growth is less than 2.7 GB per month.

There are 39 more months until 2020.

Less than 2.7 GB per month times 39 months is less than 105.3

At this rate it will grow by less than 105.3 GB by 2020.

Current size (less than) 100GB plus less than 105.3 GB of growth means that:

At this rate it will be less than 205.3 GB by 2020.

At this rate it will be a terabyte by 2045.

Some people have a hard time with math you know, you can't always make fun of them for their disabilities  ;D

I still don't understand how people can mess math like that up, however it should be noted that there is a slight compounding growth experienced by the blockchain, and so it might be something like 2035/2040 that it hits 1TB. I could be wrong about that though.

This is assuming we are keeping the blocksize at 1Mb. What if we increase it to 2MB or 16Mb or unlimited? Also, the price of storage and bandwidth is going down. It is going to be interesting in the coming 5 years.

Obviously if the rate is different then the date will change, but the statement wasn't about attempting to predict future growth rates.  The statement was about what would happen if it continued at this rate.

That being said...

Please explain. What is the cause of the compounding growth? I'm not aware of any.

It's difficult to predict how many blocks will be less than full in the future.  If EVERY block is COMPLETELY full from now on, then the rate of growth will be about 4.38 GB per month.  Unless the maximum allowed blocksize (or the average time between blocks) is changed in the future, the blockchain won't grow any faster than that.

I give it year or less :D

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-ssd-hdd-sata-nvme,32762.html

Interesting correlation, so maximum blockchin's growth it is like 1 GB per week since we have 52 weeks in a year.
I thought that there can't be empty blocks or blocks which are less than 1MB and every block is always filled to the max.

Yeah that is about right, but I just don't see why people want to download the whole thing. If I wanted to download it, it would take a day or two seeing as the internet speeds in Australia are f*cking sh*t.
You better go back to year 1 and re-learn your multiplication. how does 52 times 4 equal 900? What the hell is this.

There are a lot of people in this forum who deny this as a problem or a potentially serious problem in the future. Yes storage is becoming cheaper and cheaper every year but does that really solve the problem of the bloating blockchain? There is also a concern that bandwidth is a bigger problem than storage.

There should be solutions made in Bitcoin itself and I am confident that the core developers will find a good way.

Well the question becomes what can we do to fix the size of the blockchain? That's one of the only ways that the blockchain makes sure everything happens, and so you can't just take that away and expect nothing to break.

Is there a way to condense the data or something?

The core developers should find a way to improve the blockchain pruning methods and also work together with 3rd parties to have a good implementation of off chain transactions. Off chain transactions will hit 2 birds with one stone. It will help scale Bitcoin and it will handle the load away from bloating the blockchain.

Just another reason why we should not increase the Block size to something much bigger than it is now. The average block is not full at all, so we need to consider if any upgrade is necessary at this moment. SegWit and the Lightning network would help a lot with capacity issues and would also prevent that the Blockchain would grow to big to keep up with storage limitations. < Not that we have any issues with it, because it is fairly cheap>   

Now I'm confused!  ??? Is that 1TB in the claws of one or two African or European swallows?

LOL, I was trying to be dramatic. :D

I rather go to acting classes than boring math classes at any rate.
I'll leave the math to my accountant or some asian nerd to do that for me. ;)

People are looking at this in the wrong way... the second hand hard drives are fairly inexpensive and you can get 1 TB hard drives for

between $20 to $40 each... https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/second-hand-hard-disk.html ... So even if the Blockchain size double

every year, we would still be able to store it on second hand/ used hard drives. So why is this an issue again?

Don't know how u calculate it, but it depends heavly on many factors.
In the end, its better to find some optimization of storing blockchain, compression, i dont know but it should be considered now. After couple years it will be harder and harder to store whole blockchain.

As ever it's the bandwidth and not the storage that's the problem. There's nothing developers can do about that. Pruning of some sort would help make it a more modest download in future but it's already far more than my connection could take without coming around and slapping me.

I was 18weeks behind in the blockchain. Took nearly 8 hours to download.

I have a 10MB/S Connection.

I haven't run Bitcoin Core ever because I am not interested in operating a node or using it for daily transactions so I have never installed it on my laptop. But I am curious if there is any difference in performance between running Core on a normal HDD or on a SSD. Because I would assume that a SSD would make the update process speedier. Anyways a 240GB SSD costs as much as a 1TB HDD so I guess I would go with the SSD if 240GB will last me till 2020 plus I could always repurpose the SSD later on.

lol, my steam library is bigger than the blockchain haha :D blockchain size doesn't seem to be a problem neither does it look like it will be problem in next few years :) disk space is cheap, even where its heavily taxed!!! and flash storage/ssd will be cheaper and cheaper :) biggest prob is bandwidth, maybe, but even that...

I would say that that is the reason, why would you bother running core otherwise.  i run core because i think its important that we have as many nodes going as possible, i know for most in the world that is not feasible but if you can then you should.  I actually run some of my lightwallets with my own node as the trusted source. 

If I remember correctly, the block chain size of the Ethereum is already 70 GB after one year of existence.

Why i think you are wrong:


If you check the stats on blockchain.info, bitcoin size growth rate is not linear.

I had a similar problem recently hosting the same on azure cloud based Bitcoin full node. Although I did have a free plan for 3 years thanks to my Visual studio subscription by Microsoft, the costs were high on azure to buy disk storage. On my personal computer I have several empty hard disks and I can get several of these for very cheap, but bandwidth to download the whole blockchain is limited. Also my ISP doesn't allow me to host anything unless I purchase a public IP with unblocked ports from them at a very high rate. 92 gigs infact isn't much, but it depends on your network capacity and expenses to download it.

That graph is based on some assumptions about the future that are uncertain.

IF the max blocksize is increased significantly, THEN the blockchain could grow at an exponential rate.

However, such a change to the protocol would require the consensus of the users.

As the protocol exists today, growth in the future will be linear (as it has been for the past 12 to 18 months).


Actually, if you look at the stats on blockchain.info, ever since bitcoin reached full 1 megabyte blocks regularly, the growth HAS been linear.

The protocol has a 1 megabyte limit on maximum blocksize, so when there were less than 1 megabyte worth of transactions being created in the early days, the block size was able to grow as users created more transactions per day.  Once the 1 megabyte limit was reached, the block size stopped growing and the blockchain changed from exponential growth to linear growth.

The space-issue could be a future problem of Bitcoin soon. I see more and more people pointing out its huge size. Our HDDs are growing too but will the regular HDDs development keep pace with Bitcoin network's development?

You just helped answer the question. Hitting the upper limit now just means that the block sizes will be increased at some point within the next 5 to 10 years (hopefully within the next year).

When it does get increased, growth will be stop being linear against the upper max. So your originally point that the blockchain will only grow by ~100GiB over the next 100 years (can't remember the actual number of decades you used), is still wrong.

Forget about hardware.

Network bandwidth capacity is going to be where people find they have problems.

Hitting the limit does not mean that the maximum block size WILL be increased.  Some people feel the maximum block size should be increased, and others feel it should not.

Regardless, it probably won't be increased without the consensus of an overwhelming majority of the users.  Time will tell whether that consensus can be arranged or not.



You mean "if" it does get increased.


Nope. My point is accurate and right.

My reply was based on the statement of "at this rate" (made by the person I was replying to), meaning at the rate of growth right now today, not some imagined or possible future growth, nor some historical growth rate that existed before 2015.  If instead the person I was replying to had said "if we allow blocksize to increase by 4% per year in the future", then I would have gone with completely different calculations.  However, that's not the statement that I was replying to.

If we stay at 1mb blocks indefinitely, Core will be forked into a smaller chain.

It is a case of when, not if. 

I think you mean "larger chain".

It seems like it will just get larger because of the small transactions that are on the blockchain. With more stores and people having the Bitcoin payment option enabled it would let the other customers who buy things electronically really happy...if the BTC price doesn't crash that is.

You better get some external HD's

When you see that a 1 To HDD costs you around 50$, I don't see it being a real problem. 100 Go is not that much nowadays you know.

the thing is ... storage is astonishing.
I look my MP3 library since 1996 (minidisc recording) and i have only 224 Gb (20 years).

And look the Blockchain of Bitcoin : a whole ledger from 2009 from international network ... and only 92 Gb in 7 years.

Compression is a good.
CPU help, too (on-ship, i mean).

But what about bandwidth? It will be a real problem starting a Bitcoin node from scratch in the coming future when the blockchain becomes too large and the bandwidth stays the same. There is a reason why there are less and less Bitcoin nodes these days. It is getting harder for someone to start and maintain one regardless of what you say about storage not being a problem. The core developers should find for ways to slow down the bloat.

Before the Bitcoin fork happens, we will see the altcoin forks. In fact, we are seeing the altcoins right now (not their forks, but new coins), like a dozen every month or more, some with 10 second blocks, some with 30 second blocks, some with 1 minute blocks, and some with 2.5 minutes to 4 minutes per block.

I don't see too many alts with 10 minute blocks these days. Half of them die (run out of miners or nodes or users) within a year, the rest die in 2 to 3 years.