Bitcoin Forum

This is a general question about the design of Bitcoin (specifically related to the Blockchain).  

If the blockchain contains a record of every transaction and transactions can be very small (ie: $5 or less), then the blockchain will become very huge.  So it would seem that with all the miners in the world mining for bitcoin and manipulating this increasingly huge blockchain, the bandwidth utilized will eventually become so great that ISP's will have to either throttle the traffic to a miniscule percentage or start charging very large sums of money to forward bitcoin traffic (Bandwidth is not an infinite resource and it's not "free" either).  This implies that bitcoin is a currency without a future - ie: it will eventually implode on itself.  

Is there something wrong with this line of reasoning?  Am I missing something?  

Practically bandwidth utilization can't reach that high, can it consume more bandwidth than YouTube streaming? Of course no.

But if you talk about Power Consumption yes this is one of the major worries people having right now. According to Digiconomist’s Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, as of November 2017 Bitcoin’s estimated annual electricity consumption was around 29.05TWh. That’s the equivalent of 0.13% of total global electricity consumption.

The growth of available bandwidth due to technological improvements.

Even so you made a good observation, as that's pretty much one of the main arguments for keeping Bitcoin's blocks as small as possible. And incidentally, why Bitcoin has decided against linear on-chain scaling, favouring the likes of Lighting Network instead. The latter enabling small transactions to be accumulatively settled, without having to bloaten the blockchain with every single micro-transaction ever made.

Even as network infrastucture and technology improves, blockchain space is a limited resource and should be treated as such.

This!
Compare the blockchain size of Ethereum and Bitcoin.
Ethereum's dwarfs Bitcoin's even though Bitcoin is at least 5years older.
https://res.cloudinary.com/practicaldev/image/fetch/s--SHFjkIkC--/c_limit%2Cf_auto%2Cfl_progressive%2Cq_auto%2Cw_880/https://i.imgur.com/A5tl3oY.png


It is such a problem that Ethereum developers are talking about  charging rent to store data (https://twitter.com/raulitojordan/status/977168280904347648) on the  Ethereum blockchain  (https://ethresear.ch/t/a-simple-and-principled-way-to-compute-rent-fees/1455/39/)

OP: Even though the blockchain size is increasing linearly (at least compared to Ethereum's exponential rate), technological advances are improving and prices of storage are falling also, so it's not really a problem.

Network chatter is a killer and code that works when a new network or coin is released with just a
few nodes is not going to work when numbers hit the ten's of millions.

in the end some form of order is required which will result in specialist nodes but this does not
mean full centralization by any means. 

No it's not and not scaling is a result of a bad design and the world is not running out of numbers and if you look
to recent history when these numbers became limited and resulted in sky high fees then you will note from the data
that the price of bitcoin has been going down ever since the peek. Evolution in action   

Okay, thanks for that feedback ...however, bear in mind that YouTube streaming already operates on a heavily monetized business model.  Every time someone watches a "free" YouTube video advertisers have paid real money to Google for the ads running with it (very different from the meaning of "free" for bitcoin transactions).  When we consider the amount of Bitcoin mining going on in China right now, for example, (and perhaps Canada too) and then extrapolate that to just a few short years from now assuming that BitCoin becomes somewhat "mainstream" and then combine both the energy usage with the bandwidth usage, it seems that the picture doesn't look very sustainable.

You need to take mining out of the equation because none of the coins that rely on CPU-Wars will last the
course and indeed none of the modern day replacements for Bitcoin are using it.

I have looked at trying to scale node discovery to a billion users (One 7th of the population) and quite
simply I don't think it can be done without using clusters of specialized semi trusted nodes because the
network chatter without this would kill it.

Chaos just won't scale and we are forced to accept a degree of semi-centralization but that does not mean
we have to jump into bed with Bill Gates or the bankers but yes we do need to rely on data warehousing
which is what we have already with the bit-coin farms so it's not such a big deal really.

Bit-Torrent works and if they take down one torrent server then others just take it's place so it's not really
centralized in my book, more just specialized and that's something I can live with.

I'm not talking about "coins" in general; I'm talking about Bitcoin specifically. So when you speak of "coins that rely on CPU-Wars", you include Bitcoin as one of them ...correct?

Please ignore the known troll.
Check his post history.

Yes 100% and all the cheap copy clones too with only a slight exception for ETH who also provide a useful service.

Now that would be hard work mr troll signiture campaign manager as can be seen from the advert in your footer
and trying to work for tips number "39twH4PSYgDSzU7sLnRoDfthR6gWYrrPo" to make ends meet must be
a desperate effort on your part.

May i suggest again that you are in the wrong forum, do learn to read will you now and stop acting like a cheap
hooker who will say anything for a few cents.

And every time someone sends a bitcoin transaction, there is an incentive for them to include a small transaction fee.


I'm not sure what you are trying to say here.  It is possible that energy usage could DECREASE as the block subsidy decreases.  It is also possible that bandwidth usage could decrease as Lightning Network and other scaling solutions are implemented.

Yes, actually the mining that was going on in China has (recently) either shut down or is moving to other parts of the world so the situation has changed somewhat.

Bitcoin developers have already looked into this problem, by introducing second layer applications that are built on top of Bitcoin, called the Lightning Network. It takes most of the smaller transactions off-chain to reduce the burden on the bandwidth and storage requirements. This will become a non-issue as soon as the Lightning Network has been tested and implemented.

Let's not concern ourselves with the bandwidth that Bitcoin tx's use, when HD movies are being streamed and downloaded every day, through these ISPs and they use much more bandwidth and storage space.

Every new block is fixed size, so after u download all transactions your traffic will be 150-600 kBit/s (if I remember correctly)
And all transactions bitcoin transactions as 4-10 films in Ultra HD

Schnorr signatures itself do not increase the privacy.
After schnorr signatuers have been implemented, the foundation for future improvements (including privacy) has been layed.
With schnorr, coinjoin [1] can be built on top. And coinjoin is what increases the privacy by 'mixing up' several inputs/outputs.


https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/CoinJoin (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/CoinJoin)