Bitcoin Forum

Hi guys,

all the transaction are safed in the Blockchain, how is it made that the blockchain won't be "to big" one day?

The size of the blocks in which bitcoin transactions are stored are around 1megabyte in size. So around every 10 minutes when a new block is found 1mb of transactions are added into the blockchain database. This is not that much data overtime as so far the entire bitcoin blockchain is less than 170gigabytes which easily fits on a hardrive. However storage problems could be an issue if the blocksize were to be increased as some people believe should be done which is why bitcoin cash was formed. I however personally support smaller blocks as currently there is no need to make them bigger so why should we. Especially with lightning networks transactions could be moved off chain with payment channels and only once the channel is closed would the transaction be placed in the blockchain.

Always glad to see more interest in Bitcoin! :)

It will get too big one day but probably, hard drives and SSDs would be much cheaper so everyone would still be able to afford running a full node. The reason why most people don't support bigger blocks is this, people will no longer be able to run a node and only big companies will be able to so, so the network will be less decentralized and we don't want that.

Actually there is no guarantee for the chain not to become 'too big' and eventually it will grow large enough to be considered so.

Most proponents, (not me) argue that the growth ratio is not so high to prevent the technology and Moor's law to keep costs reasonable. I feel far more sympathy for protocols and ideas that are in favor of exempting more and more transactions from being registered in a public blockchain, though.

I think performance as well as privacy challenges should be considered too. Once you insist on registering every single event in the blockchain you have to pay a considerable cost in both respects.

It is worth adding that this is also one of the reasons why 2nd layer solutions such as Lightning Network are important approaches on solving the scalability challenge. Finding a way to move at least part of the transactions off-chain, in a secure and decentralized way, is necessary to allow for Bitcoin to scale non-linearly. Otherwise you're reduced to increasing blocksize whenever a new capacity threshold is reached, which is arguably not a viable solution.

Hi guys, I got a question kind of related to this...

A friend of mine got some bitcoins a few years back, now he told me he can't operate with his old laptop (hard disk capacity issues, I guess he can't dowload the whole blockchain, and I say I guess cause I started reading about bitcoins just yesterday, to try to help him with his issue).

Question is, he needs to buy another pc, and the new one will have 2 hard drives (ssd 120gb for the apps and s.o. and another one 1TB). Is it possible to download your wallet and operate with bitcoins in the bigger 1TB HD? or you just have to use the s.o. hard drive, meaning 120 GB will be too little HD space?

thanks for your help
pablo

I believe the current size is somewhere around 140GB but I may be mistaken there. If he's hoping to run a full node or sync is wallet then judging by the size of the SSD he is going for then 120GB wouldn't be enough. 1TB will be find for now. I would probably recommend hosting on a traditional hard drive either way.


I think one of the argument before this become a more well known concern was that technology would evolve with the size of the blocks too. Of course the size continues to grow at a very fast rate and seems to be growing too fast for technology to evolve.

Unless technology becomes cheaper, then it's only going to be the more wealthy and like you said big companies which are in control of the integrity of Bitcoin.

This is different question, so you should have posted a new thread, but here is one solution for your friend:

You do not have to buy a new computer. You can just get your private keys from the old bitcoin-core without needing to download the whole blockchain, and then import those keys to electrum, which will work in the old machine.

More info here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2250550.msg22754328#msg22754328 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2250550.msg22754328#msg22754328)

hey guys thanks a lot for your help!!!

If your friend simply wants to send/receive bitcoins then downloading the whole blockchain is not necessary, he could download a lightweight wallet such as Electrum. If he wants to run a full node however, then 120GB is small and won't suffice him, assuming that he is going to install Bitcoin Core for that matter, he could change the location for the folder that goes to the AppData folder by default to his 1TB HDD.

hey OmegaStarScream, thanks for the input, that was basically his question... could I operate with a full node in the 1TB HD? (considering speed and considering the O.S is not installed there). I had serious doubts about it and thought it will be better installed in the ssd HD, as Welsh said before.

I will tell him about all your suggestions, thanks a lot (he'll probably decide to use Electrum, although he wants to buy the new machine either way)

The speed increase from using the SSD HD instead of the 1TB HD will make no real difference, because he will hardly feel the

difference. Most people will use a 1TB { SATA 6Gb/s } HDD and it will run almost at the same speed as the SSD. The only

time when speed comes into play for me is, when you want your transactions to confirm faster and that has nothing to do

with HDD speed.  ;D {The higher the miners fee, the faster the confirmation of your transactions.} ..in theory.  :-\

Cool!
thanks Kprawn, he will definitely then use the 1TB HD for the wallet.

even in long term, I don't think disk space would be a big problem. For miners, they can always afford such disk space, no need SSD as the it is not the most time consuming thing.
while normal users could choose between full node and svp, even developers could design something in the middle, get a small image which is a compact data of first 10 million blocks and of course the image archived in consensus, then normal user even miner could take advantage of it.

Do you know that soon a microSD card will have a size of several Terabits? Technology is evolving fast

It doesn't grow that fast. In the four years since the beginning it is only 150 GB. I have tow or three spare drives that are 500 TB and that would take quite some time for the chain to hit there.
If people would stop jacking with the code, then it could be predicted like in the old days, but hey, someone has to kill the coin.
 

What limit. This is digitial world and there is no limits. I have been in IT since Commoder 64 ruled and in this last 20-25 year  time span IT grew exponentially each day. And as KEPLER99 said blockchain is for today standards only 150GB.

The blockchain has been a possibility to global warming by providing a transparent currency.The potential for blockchain is enormous. Each block on the bitcoin blockchain is able to contain one megabyte there is a limitation how the bitcoin blockchain operates. That tends to slow the transaction as bitcoin become popular.limitation relates to data storage capacity of each block.

Yes of course it is getting bigger with the passage of time and will continue to grow more in future but why bother if we have big storage devices like hard drives for this purpose. Don't need to worry technology is evolving and getting better and better day by day, so we may have some other way outs for this in future.

Don't you think that by the time we reach a blockchain of a size that is considered too big (right now) we would have found methods to store more data on less for a relatively cheaper price. I'm not really a geek when it comes to hard drives but when I put together my pc in 2014 the guys from the store I was purchasing my parts from told me they were getting shipments of hard drives of 4-6TB. Surely in 10 years it will be quite common to have a hard disk of 10 TB or even more?

Probably what would happen is less nodes would store the full transaction history. Then most client nodes would just run a portion of the historical data. This is how Ethereum Geth does it, the full chain is 300-400GB but its less then 10GB for most clients since it doesn't have full transaction history

can it turn out that some day blockchain will introduce some limits?

Not really possible, it will have to grow in size otherwise the blockchain would finish. They can do things to optimize the size, like not giving the full history to all users