Bitcoin Forum

I remember reading this here the other day I think, and it was at a 1MB blocksize rate.... I would guess that in 4 years maybe the blockchain has been increased, at least doubled.

Anyway, let's imagine it doesnt, and we stay at 1MB.... what do you think the price for 700GB will be in 4 years? If things don't change much, it means running a node will take almost an entire HD (let's say the usual HD size is 1TB).

What happens once the size goes beyond 1TB, or beyond the biggest HD? what happens when you can't fit the blocksize in a regular HDs? Can you run 3/4 of the blockchain then the remaining 1/4 part in another HD?

The block size? The block size is most definitely not going to by 700 Gb. That's way to large. You're probably thinking of the blockchain size. The blockchain currently grows at a rate of 144 MB per day. With Segwit, it can grow at a maximum of 576 MB per day. You can then extrapolate that to the maximum size the blockchain at any point in time.

Hard drive capacity will continue to increase, and it will most certainly outpace the growth of the blockchain. Disk space gets cheaper by the day. The concern should really be on bandwidth, CPU, and RAM bottlenecs. It takes a lot of bandwidth to download the entire blockchain and a lot of CPU and memory to process all of that data.

You've been excellent at answering many questions on many threads then you come out with this tired trope. Please don't disseminate this rubbish. It's not, and has never been, a solution. It is the bitcoin equivalent of "Have faith that God shall provide".

Isn't SegWit supposed to make things smaller instead of bigger ? at least his is what I got from this infographic https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/43sjfz/the_bitcoin_core_roadmap_explained_i_made_an/

"Does it decrease the amount of information needed to secure the blockchain and therebefore make syncing with the blockchain faster you ask ? Why yes , yes It does"

Yeah I made a mistake, I meant to say blockchain. I post when I take a break from my job and my head is thinking about a lot of things at the same time.

But even if the price of HDs keep going lower, what happens if someday the blockchain is growing fast enough to be bigger than the average HD? I don't see average HD size getting higher than 1TB in the near future (I mean the average person doesn't need more than 1TB..)

No. Segwit will make things bigger, like a block size increase. Something has to get bigger in order to allow more transactions.

That is an invalid argument. 20 years ago the average person didn't need more than 100 GB of storage. File sizes have been getting progressively larger. Just because something is that way now doesn't mean it won't change in the future.

Yeah but I mean in 4 years.

I don't see anyone I know needing more than 1 TB in 4 years, yet, if they wanted to run a bitcoin node, they would run out of space with their regular 1 TB HD which is more than enough for most people. People no longer store movies etc, since connections are so good that you can stream them in HD. So most HD space goes for games, and 1 TB is more than enough. The average computer user will not need more than 1 TB in 4 years at all.

Sigh!  :'( Yet still the full nodes keep diminishing.

We aren't going to hit 1 TB in 4 years.

You're still going to need programs, games, etc. Everything that you can't store in the cloud. Furthermore, I think there will be shift towards offline storage again because of mass surveillance by organizations like the NSA who go to the cloud hosting companies and ask them for user data.

No.  They wouldn't.

The math is quite simple and very clear that we won't exceed 1TB in 4 years unless block sizes get MUCH larger (more than 4X today's 1 MB size).  They are currently limited to 1 megabyte.

Bitcoin has been running for 8 years now and the blockchain is less than 90 gigabytes.  If we grow at double that rate in the next 4 years, then the blockchain will only be 135 GB.

If EVERY blocks is COMPLETELY full at 1 MB per block for the next 4 years, it will only grow to 300.4 GB.

If block sizes are doubled with a hard fork, and EVERY block is COMPLETELY full at 2 MB per block, it will only grow to 510.8 GB.

Try the math yourself.

Take the size (in megabytes) you think the block will grow to after a hard fork.  Multiply that by 144 (blocks per day).  Multiply that by 365.25 (average days per year).  Multiply that by the number of years you want to know about.  Add 90,000 and the result will be the size of the blockchain (in mgabytes) at that time.

1.6 Mega (after segwit) * 144 * 365 = 80 Giga per year

80 * 4 + 90 = 410 GB    by the end of 2020

It will be happening in 12 years' time.

You seem to have MBs and GBs confused which is very out of character. I'm guessing they are typos. Might want to correct them.


Bitcoin was designed with the advancement of technology in mind. The whole difficulty adjustment thing is to ensure that, even as CPUs get faster, we continue to get blocks that are 10 minutes apart on average. If you feel that expecting technology to continue to advance is wrong then you should find some other hobby. Forget about bitcoin.

Yep.

There I am explaining how easy the math is, and yet I get my units mixed up and make a mess of everything.  Thanks for catching it.  I think I've fixed it, but at this point I'm a but burned out today and don't have much confidence in my ability to add and subtract.

Condescending much? It's like arguing with creationists!  ;D

It's not a case of forgetting about bitcoin. It's about preventing it becoming purely a back end service for VISA, Paypal and Western Union.

The thread you are talking about is

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1612543.0

Pepe saw this thread too, but is not convinced by the wild assumptions made in this thread.

Let assume 10% growth of the blockchain monthly. Quite real assumption.

It means growth of 3x every year.

It means blockchain growth of 81x every 4 years.

Exponential low.

This may be somewhat slower or faster which depends on the real world acceptance of bitcoin.

I think bitcoin and other virtual coin will remain "good" communitiy experiment only. Tools for "playing" on the exchanges and creating very few very rich people - it depends on the "communities" again.

FWIW, the biggest segwit block so far on testnet (#894090) is 3876524 bytes.

So, had all of them been as big as that one, it's 144*365*3876524, giving almost 204 GB per year.

Some method of snapshoting an entire UTXO set, at each/certain chain height and broadcasting/distributing these snapshots in a secured way - this is becoming more and more desirable... Not to say necessary.

But after it's finally done and accepted by the network, the blockchain size should not matter much anymore.

Yeah would seg wit not make a difference to this calculation now ?

I already put a link to this draft of mine in one similar thread here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.07926 . Going to polish it soon to announce then widely. PoW has ben changed(to solve incentives problem as well), so Bitcoin can't go this way definitely.

There is no will to resolve this issue. indeed. It is being actively resisted because....money. It seems that many of those that are worried about it are only interested because it is the last thing they might be able to monetise because mining is now out of their reach.  

Satoshi Nakamoto (https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09964.html)

hardware capacity will increase ok, but what if people need to put the full node online 24h\24h because they have web services and things like this?
It would be impossible!
I want to open a full node now (not for mining but for developing) and I can't because it's too big!

There is no reason for the core developers to do that.
700gb is x700000 then the current block size, even if the whole world are going to use bitcoins at a daily basis we won't need such a block size.

Anyway, such a block size would hurt the community, as machines who stores the whole blockchain will need to have a massive built-in memory, which is almost impossible, and will make running a node alot harder and much more expensive then it used to be.

There are thousands of full nodes, so clearly it is not "impossible".   There are many, many places you can launch a full node on a VPS or colo hardware for a full node.

Do you remember floppy disks, size was 1.44 mb. I bought 1tb external hard disk two years ago, and now there is even bigger hard disks. So what we are talking about, digits goes up each year? And everything is happening very fast.
Welcome to technology era, new things are invented, old are upgraded, and upgrades are upgraded. Things will be alright, this will never happen, they are arguing now about block size, to increase it to 700 MB in 4 years is impossible. Where ever you read this guy who wrote it doesn't know nothing about bitcoins.

You don't have 100 GB of storage? Otherwise, I don't see why you can't. Optionally you could run a pruned node.

No, you don't understand what is being talked about here. They are not talking about 700 GB blocks, but the blockchain size growing towards 700 GB (currently ~100GB).

Obvious spam post. You have clearly read nothing and just wrote up some nonsense that you think is relevant when in fact it is not.

LVM will do the trick. Anyone can build a virtual 2TB HDD from 2 hdd 1TB cap.
It's not a HDD cap problem, it's how btc works.

Yes it will be. It is already around 100gb and it just doesn't make sense to download all those senseless crap to your precious harddrive. I am using electrum because of this. Bitcoin core database can also get corrupted once in a while and its a pain in the ass to fix it back. (it takes days to fix it)

Here is a calculator to help you.

https://iancoleman.github.io/blocksize/#_

I would suggest 1.5MB is a good average to set it to for the next 4 years. You are looking at about 205 GB a year max or under ~800GB after 4 years.

Well if we can get the blocks smaller, it won't matter. Also, if memory space is growing at a good rate, 700GB won't really be a big deal.

Hard drive space growths exponentially. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hard_drive_capacity_over_time.png
Bitcoin blockchain growths lineally.

Simple calculation shows what 1 modern hard drive can store full blockchain. That is not a problem.
 

That is a very nice graph. It does a good job explaining why this shouldn't be so much of concern. SPV clients make it easier for the average joe to spend btc and nodes are the only ones that will need beefy drives.

That is not going to happen. Smaller blocks? Where did you get that absurd idea from? Luke-jr? :D

It's obvious that neither one of you have no clue what you're talking about. Please do not spread such false knowledge. Good luck trying to:
1) Synchronize a blockchain of 700gb in 4 years.
2) Re-indexing such a chain, since "this shouldn't be so much of concern".

There are people that value their security and privacy and thus run full wallets (full wallet != node).

I'm curious.

In your opinion, what's the difference between a "full wallet" and a "full node"?

I would say that a full node is a system which is using a full client implementation and has their port(s) open, thus it is sharing their data with the network (blocks and transactions). I have such a system somewhere. I also have Bitcoin Core on my laptop, which does not have any ports open and is only run when I want to transact (i.e. it is only used as a wallet). So a 'full wallet' would be a fully validating client that is used primary as a wallet and does not contribute to the network.

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Am I wrong, or is this difference just not commonly used? I could also claim that 'true' full nodes are only those that have a certain % of up-time, but that is hard to properly define (e.g. what is the right threshold?).

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Update: I guess I was slightly wrong here assuming that a node does almost spends no upload bandwidth on incoming peers.

But it does contribute to the network. It still has outgoing connections and it still validates and then relays all blocks and transactions that it receives to its peers.

The distinction should be that a full wallet is a full node, but not the other way around. A full node fully verifies and validates every block and transaction it receives and then relays them to its peers. However a full node need not necessarily have wallet capabilities. A full wallet is a full node with wallet capabilities.

But it doesn't need 100GB of disk storage to do that after it has synch'd.

On an aside to your last sentence......

Something like libbitcoin (https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin) should be the reference implementation, preferably with a run-time plugin architecture for custom coins, and the community should supply pre-built binaries.  Then developers across platforms can get their teeth into applications instead of trying to rip out bits out of another application. An RPC interface isn't good enough for developers.

Only Moores law isn't linear so that graph is misleading.

Don't be fooled by the deniers. Moores law is an observation, not a "law", and the tech industry is already downplaying its significance. CPU speed has plateaued (http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/203490-moores-law-is-dead-long-live-moores-law)  and memory (which is the tech being flouted by the 700GB fanantics) hasn't been following Moores law for quite some time (https://motherboard.vice.com/read/memory-is-holding-up-the-moores-law-progression-of-processing-power).

Physics is a bitch and if one looks at all the technologies then the industry has come to the conclusion that Moores law is no longer valid. Intel, recently, changed Moores law to a "design goal" rather than a rigid expectation.

The shamen praying to Moores law for future proofing the blockchain will be finding their incantations insufficient.

+1 for this...
I think it may reach the 700Gb only after 2023 or after.
and Segwit increases the size not the other way.

Common hard drive space will keep up with the demands of the blockchain just fine. 1TB will be nothing in ten years and by the mid 2020s we will probably have 1TB on mobile devices and such to keep up with 4K video and larger file sizes of all kind. I remember not that long ago when 1GB of storage was a big deal. The size of the total blockchain is the least of bitcoins worries right now.

I guess that means you do not really see the need for Segwit and Lightning network?

You are probably right, perhaps in a decade there will be more devices with a lot of storage capacity, but I do not want to imagine the amount of time it will take to download the entire chain, maybe the future lies in light wallets, and large chains will be stored in data-centers, If you look on the graphs of the size of the chain , it is being stretched to form a straight line upwards, and when this happens the size will grow at an exorbitantly large rate, perhaps it will be the largest system of data storage known by the human since the beginning of mankind, That is why other insurance projects are offering alternatives that are much more economical and more practical to perform, but since all are represented as pairs of BTC continue to carry on transactions to the huge chain.

while that may be true, technology is going fast too.  at this moment, there are two distinct wallet types for a computer, one that needs the block chain downloaded and one that does not.  for common practice, a lightweight wallet is fine.  i would imagine that those downloading the full boat, there are reasons, such as coding and programming tx's that they wish to do, that is why we have the whole chain.

also, tech for storage is going fast too.  it was not long ago that a usb drive was restricted to under 64 GB, they are much bigger now.  i would wager that a quick search could bring up a 1 TB usb drive, i could be wrong, but i bet if not right now, within a year it will be out there

I've got a cheap HP notebook that is over a year old, and the hard drive is 2Tb. I expect my next one will be much larger than that.

Internet bandwidth is more of a concern when we talk about block sizes than HD space.

As Lauda already mentioned that's why synchronizing and reindexing a large blockchain would be a pain. The most obvious and easy solution would be to download blockchain snapshots before synchronizing, but that should be no solution for reindexing and it also could lead to some centralization (e.g. when most users use a certain source, that repo could develop into a single point of failure).

So in my opinion, it's absolutely a "must" that Bitcoin gets enhanced features which allow the main blockchain to inter-operate in a trustless manner with sidechains and alt-chains, and to do off-chain transactions (LN and similar solutions). However, a slight maximum block size increase should be doable (10-20% per year), as this is approximately the average internet bandwith growth per year.

once we start operating off the block chain, then we are open to security issues.  keep in mind that a new or casual user these days or a "commerce" user in the near future does not know enough about the way bitcoin works to not get taken advantage of.  right now, that block chain, whether downloaded or accessed via the network is the one thing that will keep the novices safe

In part (as far as I understand LN and other similar proposals) I agree. There are more things an user must know and evaluate when using these off-chain systems than with regular on-chain transactions.

But in my opinion, LN and other off-chain methods are still suitable if you use them for small micropayments (everything less than 5-10 USD). Most people in first-world countries could afford to "risk" enabling a LN payment channel for, let's say, 100 USD per month. It would be like a prepaid card, and for potential scammers there would be probably not enough incentive to attack single users. (If there are attack scenarios that could affect multiple users at the same time, that may change, though).

When I bought my first 1TB harddrive, it was more than 5 years ago.

I believe most people can afford 700GB for now.

when you go to the the site bitcoin.org and go to download section says
is this the size of the core or the size that has right now the blockchain. i guess the blockchain is downloaded by the core, am i right