Bitcoin Forum

Currently the database seems to 10 fold each 1.5 years or so.

11 GB today.
100 GB 1.5 years from now
1 TB 3 years from now
10 TB 4.5 years from now.
100 TB 6 years from now.
1 PB 7.5 years from now.
10 PB 9 years from now.
100 PB 10.5 years from now.

Nobody can predict the future, though there are some trends.

Harddisk size will probably not keep up with the database size.
Raid systems will also fall short a few years later.

This also does not include additional popularity/transaction volume for bitcoin, if transaction volume goes up further and thus database size goes up faster it might even end much sooner, maybe even within 5 or 4 or 3 years.

One possible solution that could safe bitcoin is a distributed database size, where computers only store a part of the blockchain and will have to rely on each other to provide some sort of trust/security.

However this may also lead to additional network bandwidth requirements for checking/traversing inputs to see if they are spendable.

Downloading the blockchain itself is already somewhat of a problem for newcomers and people that were dorment for a while, it takes quite a long time, this could hamper it's popularity/up take. A distributed database my solve this problem somewhat as well.

I think development of bitcoin should focus on and give priority too distributing the database in some form or another if bitcoin is too survive, otherwise it's going to be a lot of fun watching it literally crash and burn ! ;) =D Like that episode of southpark: "poooof and it's gone ! =D"

Perhaps alt-coins will take over for a while, until they too run into similiar problems, and then the other alt-alt-coins will take over and so forth :)
Though perhaps users of bitcoin then in a jam... can't really go along with it unless new harddisks bought.

Prices of harddisks may start to rise a bit in the coming years.
Raid systems might become popular among bitcoin users.
And perhaps other storage solutions, perhaps network attached storage devices with additional capacity.

Also I wonder a little bit what happens if somebody wants to send some bitcoins to some address, will the checking/traversing time for input checking increase as well ? For example the inputs to be used where from long ago ? Does bitcoin perhaps find the nearest input ? How that work ? Maybe some smart indexing or keeping track of inputs ? Perhaps that not a problem...

Another little concern now that I am venting some concerns is with the difficulty only being raised each 2016 blocks. Apperently this is somewhat strange... somewhat like people getting free rides. They purchase enough computation power to ride out that 2016 block range with ease... and take all the pie ? hmmm bit strange, I guess it remains fair to all, except that the 10 minutes is further reduced to something much faster ? So estimates when last bitcoin may be mined could be off, to way off.

Seeing that difficulty raise to huge proportions is kinda funny, it shows the inability of humans to work together efficiently and take only what they need/deserve. If all would mine with 1 cpu the difficulty would have remained much lower and all would have gotten their fair share ;)
The difficulty is a reflection of greed among the miners. They want all bitcoins to be theirs however it will never really be theirs, the difficulty will always adjust to 10 minutes or so, however if they have most processing power then they might still get all of it if they a bit lucky ;)
It could also reflect that there is some profit being made, which would allow reinvestments into hardware, or it could be investment gambles which may fail.

Oh yeah and finally there is one other little thing I wonder about, bitcoin assumes sha256 will always have hashes with zeros in front. I wonder if perhaps this is not true and some day the system will get stuck at a certain difficulty because sha256 can no longer produce hashes with enough zeros in front of it.
Personally I think this may be somewhat unlikely but I dont know the algorithm that well, has anybody analyzed if such a situation is possible ?

Why do newcomers need to download the blockchain? Its a public ledger available online, its not necessary for 99.9% of the bitcoin community to ever download locally.

it's nice point one must find a solution to this problem.

Bitcoin is supposed to be a p2p system, using the web or any other central point for download or transaction-only-interaction pretty much defeats the original idea, not that that will stop anybody from using it apperently.

However do you trust the web ? Seems dangerous and a security risk ;)

I think it was already mentioned that the developers are thinking about dropping part of the block chain that becomes useless after a while, keeping the limit of the database to a specific amount.

SPV, used in Electrum/MultiBit, can verify transactions, without the whole block chain, or central reliance.

All good points I don't know the future is impossible to predict Im sure when btc was at 130 then went to 70 no one was thinking it would go to 1000 we were all worrying that bitcoin might be done

Bitcoin userbase is growing 10 fold per year (hence the blockchain is growing 10 fold)

3 million users estimate now
30 million 1 year
300 million 2 years
3 billion 3 years
30 billion 4 years

Before 6 years there will not be enough people left in the world to become bitcoin users
Moore's law will outpace bitcoin once there are no more people left to use bitcoin.

We will use more online e-wallet for small amount of money and more paper wallet for the remaining bitcoin(in my opinion in the future they can someway be used as cash dollars), that's it  ;D

I don't think this is correct, somebody will still need to store the entire blockchain. The website for electrum mentions a "server". From the looks of it this client is communicating with their server to get the blocks. And you trust that ? ;) :)

Good point, however, people may start to use bitcoin more and more and more, still leading to some additional doubling of volumes :) which could still be somewhat problematic. Perhaps even 10 folds.

Perhaps games will start to use bitcoin. I wouldn't recommend it because it would make bitcoin explode almost literally, but we are all powerless to stop it.
If such a scenerio happens we could be seeing a 100x fold, 1000x fold or even 1000000 fold pretty much overnight. That'll be the end of it quite quickly.
Huge ammounts of transactions happen in some games. It would probably dwarf bitcoin easily.

In the real world, maybe transactions don't happen that much, at least the usual stuff, like groceries, buying a pizza, filling the car tank gas, then again there are also the financial world and such... which could have high volumes... imagine all of that switching to bitcoin ? :):):)

It "utilizes" a server, in a sense, to provide small parts of the blockchain. However, it doesn't have to trust the server, due to SPV verification.

I'm one of the most vocal of the 'keep it distributed' crowd, but yes, I trust that.  There are ways to keep such a construct safe, and as long as there are a handful of independent parties operating a Bitcoin server, it is unlikely that there would be cheating.

Where I have a problem with such a construct is that when only relatively large entities with significant capital invested and dependent on high end bandwidth are critical to the system's operation, it opens the system up to method for control and subversion either externally (e.g., regulatory) or internally (e.g., 'redlisting'.)  We've already seen it happen in the privacy sphere in PRISM to use a well known example.

Ok this is very funny, this could explain some double spents/attacks. Satoshi admitted this mode isn't too safe:

""the verification is reliable as long as honest nodes control the network".

"
This is a concern in a situation where an SPV client is subjected to a double-spend attack by somebody who controls its network connection. For example, suppose you are at a wi-fi cafe and are paying for something using your smartphone -- the cafe owner controls your network connection.
"

^ Perhaps cafe owner can quickly double spent any change ?! ;)

Yes there are all sorts of extra factors - but there is a tipping point somewhere were either Moore's law takes over and the blockchain (relatively speaking) gets smaller and smaller, or the computing resources available to run bitcoin become too expensive and bitcoin fails.

Ultimately though the blockchain cannot continue to grow exponentially - at which point price performance of computing makes it easier and easier to run bitcoin (blockchain etc)

Perhaps quantum harddisks will come to exist, perhaps they can store much more information ;)

Perhaps quantum computers can keep running bitcoin, or perhaps they will crack bitcoin and then it spectacularly fails :) (apperently hash algorithm can be changed but are there any quantum safe hashing algorithms ? rsa/bitcoin accounts/addresses would be cracked/plundered ? or perhaps does that curve algorithm protect against quantum attacks ? ;) blockchain could probably be faked/recomputed though could be detected ;))

Another good point you make, even with a distributed database, it cannot continue to grow exponentially, unless maybe quantum computers can handle exponential growth ? ;)

When bitcoin runs out of harddisk space it will probaby stop functioning and it will simply crash/fail like you say.

However some people may still have some harddisk space so then perhaps it will continue to function for those lucky few ;)

I think in reality big corporations like google, microsoft, facebook might take over and store the blockchain on their harddisks which they have plenty of.

Thus bitcoin might turn into a client/server system which pretty much make it the biggest fail ever :) it will happily continue running, but it's original idea is d.e.a.d :)

LOL, but then the funny part is... even google/microsoft/facebook will have the exponential growth and eventually will have to give up ? :)

Read the title of this thread, now I'm seeking a tree.

https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSMBiZ1AbGQcnujKhwoF7GStRfw0D0cze_dSo4N9RhL7cI5CVUL

and "we" will.

This indeed is something the coders have to think about! However as more people are going to use bitcoin the value will keep rising, I think transactions will become more behind the 0.0. Which is the benefit of having a completely digital currency. However a wallet like multibit which calculates the bitcoin amount compared to the USD value would be a must have for daily use.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Thin_Client_Security

Because you cretin, if it became the default for people to verify against a subset of the blockchain, then that situation would very quickly be exploited.

Someone was working on flipping the blockchain (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=204283.msg3117454#msg3117454), apparently design phase is over but there were no updates since 4 months. Two years ago there were estimates that 90% of blockchain can be pruned.

Are you having a bad day or something?

It just amazes me that people who are betting their financial future on Bitcoin know so little about it.

I think there is a good chance that bitcoin might be gone in 6 years but I don't think it's because the blockchain.

Heh, why not just prune it all once a month and then anyone can do any transaction they please.

a distributed blockchain seems definitely the best option to me. probably the know-how is already there (torrents etc.).
then even who shares his bandwidth and diskspace could earn a slice of the fees pie.

Fliping the blockchain means doing proof of work on UTXO (it will be merged minned) so that new nodes won't have to download whole blockchain to verify new transactions. Currently 0.8x qt nodes calculate their own UTXO when downloading blockchain, with flipped chain POWed UTXO can be downloaded directly after downloading blockheaders. Of course some well budgeted organisations (NSA) will prefer to have complete record of all transations (and some good blockexplorer available to employees).

Bandwidth is more expensive than storage. I could see nodes storing UTXO and random old blocks (software with slider on how many old blocks do you want to retain)  if flipping the chain was impossible for some reason.

Call me when there is a fully functional UTXO implementation in place. So far all I see is a lot of chat, and a demand for payment to do the work.

Flipping the chain is more question whether UTXO changes can be calculated and verified in miliseconds so blocks can propagate fast.

Mini blockchain and blockchain pruning

Quit posting long discredited arguments with provocative titles. It makes you seem stupid.

Which greatly diminishes the security of the blockchain.


The only real solution would be for transactions verified against a subset of the blockhcain to have some degree of reversibility.

Explain how either solution diminishes the security of the blockchain.

Allow me to rephrase.

The solutions greatly diminish the integrity of a certain class of Bitcoin transactions.

The p2p thing is more about user functionality. Even if only large corporations or states run nodes, they will be competitive with each other. Though there will be some centralization, it won't foster collusion and monopolization.

Oh please, kids download dozens of movies nowadays that are bigger than 10Gigs, each and every day. It's a non-issue and will be resolved by growing diskspace and the reduction of blockchain data to a necessary amount. Please come back with this subject when the blockchain is 100TB and 100TB harddisks haven't been invented.

I'm genuinely interested. Do you have any links to share?

Wow , 3 pages of a thread that shouldn't have existed if the Op would have read the Bitcoin wiki.

I am so disappointed by the amount of people who replied to this thread who did not give the obvious answer by Satoshi himself when he created Bitcoin addressing this very issue.


I invite all readers and posters of this thread to read about this thing called Bitcoin:
http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Thank you Elwar, :)

Yeah, kids who have time to download and watch multi-gigs of movies.  And don't have to worry about bandwidth or disk space, in other words techie kids.  to the other 99% of the population it might be an issue.  I myself balked at the idea of having to download all that (restricted bandwidth and taking up space on my small SSD) 9 mths ago so abandoned the reference client.  fortunately l i found Multibit otherwise i may have stayed away. 

In other words do not assume that because its not an issue to you that it wont be an issue to others.  That attitude in general will lead to wider public not accepting and adopting the technology, just how they haven't accepted desktop Linux despite all the advantages.  When a friend version came along, in the form of Android, they happily lapped it up.  Technical issues must be out of sight for the vast majority of the public, they don't want to deal with that stuff.

Let me put it this way. If someone wants to use bitcoins for long-term storage of value they should be interested in the technical side of things. After all, they might put a lot of money into it. If we are talking about spending some coins for a coffee paid with a qr code, an altcoin and an android wallet will do. People will never use Bitcoin to buy anything smaller than a car or a house, or a yacht. It is not for everyone, just like gold is held only by 1-2 % of the population. You will never carry gold around to buy a t-shirt. But you will have to buy a computer with a fairly large harddisk and install the client. If you can't or don't want to have to deal with, Bitcoin is not for you. On that note, DGC might be for you. It has a wonderful android wallet. :-)

I'm fairly confident that a no-bullshit trusted cypto-currency will develop.  Trust, to me and probably others like me, means that it's function is not dependent on large corporations but rather is highly distributed and autonomous.  If Bitcoin proper does not develop into such a thing than something else will, and will probably leave some of Bitcoin's design deficiencies behind.  I'd prefer that Bitcoin is the one which takes on this role since I already have a boat-load of them, but it might actually be better if Bitcoin ends up trying to be everyone's coffee money (where it is even less competitive than as a reserve currency) and ends it's life as simply the match that got the fire started.

in 1.5 years anybody involved with bitcoin to the point that they're willing to operate as a node, will likely be able to afford vast amounts of space. I spent 0.4 on a 500gb ssd and the current blockchain doesn't even put a dent in it. while conventional hard disks aren't growing very large in size as time goes on (i think largest commercial drive right now is 4 or 5TB?), the size of ssd's are growing rapidly. just a couple years ago ssds were available in pretty much 3 sizes. 32gb/64gb/128gb, now there are 2tb+ ssds. in 6 years, bitcoin will either fail or the only nodes necessary to run will be mining pools, the operators of which have made fortunes by now with the 3%ish they've been taking all these years, along with tx fee bonuses. it's also 6 years to figure out a solution to the issue, such as p2p distribution as others have mentioned.

OP assumes everyone who uses currency wants to educate them self further of how money works.

OP is dead wrong.

Bitcoin will continue because we have the option.

New comers do not need to download the block chain, that defeats the purpose of BTC.

It is about OPTIONS.

Average hard drive today 500GB-1TB+
10-100TB 1.5 years from now
etc

Nobody can predict the future, though there are some trends.

This is indeed somewhat of a problem.  :-\
I keep my btc in blockchain.info because I don't have that many to make it worth downloading the local wallet.

Do you need to download all of the internet too? It can easily be looked up and a 1TB HD is cheap.

Then use a SPV wallet such as multibit instead of running a full node. It isn't by accident that is the default wallet that is recommended on bitcoin.org.

Storing the block chain only matters to people that want to run a full node.

So, 3 pages and no one mentions that blocks are limited in size? Once blocks are full there is no 10-fold size increase anymore.

This was my thoughts exactly, why on earth does this thread continue?

Well that's a pile of horsecrap.
How can you even compare downloading a movie (which you download to watch, then are free to delete), to having to Sync for about 8 to 10 hours before you can start using bitcoin, then being stuck with an ever growing piece of data on your harddrive that you can't delete, because then you wouldn't be able to use bitcoin?
blockchain  pruning is something that has been around for ages now and it still hasn't happened yet....

Do you live in prehistory? You can buy a 4TB one for 150$ or so  :D

Where do you live? In my place it is quite hard to get a decent 4TB hard disk for $150. The going rate for a Seagate 4 TB is $300 in local currency.

Yeah, like satoshi never tought of this.

They are already working on a solution for this... Seriously if you think you're so clever that you found a flaw that no one else found, at least use the search function.

Can't believe there's still so many noob questions even though you're locked in noob prison for 4 hours before you can even post here.

Although I currently wouldn't trust e-wallets that will store your bitcoins for you... I would imagine in the coming years there will be sites/services that offer the same level of safety and or insurance that online banking/finincal sites offer. The average non techy person out there prefers to store their money/savings in things like banks ,  most people put their money in the back instead of keeping wads of cash under their mattress.  I don't see why bitcoin would be any different.  So the oppturnity for a company (or even banks)  to start offering insurance and the ability to keep peoples money safely stored is huge,  and I do believe there are already quite a few people in silicon valley and the banking industry trying to work on such things.

In summary , as bitcoin expands past it's current user base now and moves more into the everyday mainstream lives of the average person  I really don't think many people will be storing their own bitcoins. They will be using other companies/service providers that offer some sort of insurance like a bank does.

I said average, 4TB is no where near average user computer space.

The devs say it's a matter of when, not if the block size is increased again. I say "again" because it's been increased multiple times in the past couple years.

There actually doesn't seem to be any point to the max block size (given it's raised as soon as regular volume frequently bumps into it) except perhaps the worry that someone will create a 100GB block for giggles.


--


Bitpay and Coinbase are far more tempting options for merchants than running a node themselves (merchants used to run their own nodes as Satoshi seemed to suggest, then lost a lot of coins because they didn't have the know-how and time to secure it). So maybe we'll have ~5 online wallets, ~40 exchanges, and ~10 major merchants/processors running their own node on a giant array of hard drives and a direct connection into "the Internet." There is no subsidy for running a full node. You'll pretty much have to do it out of charity unless you can't afford to trust anyone else. For most of us, though, the problem will be that we can't afford to trust no one, which is kinda what Bitcoin set out to solve. 55 total full nodes operating is a garbage set-up. Even if 90% of the blockchain could be reliably pruned, we're going to be at this same point within a couple years - and then what?

I think the real issue with the blockchain, and I think the first coin to solve this issue is going to be that Bitcoin 2.0, is that unlike providing Internet service, there's no way to charge for blockchain service right now. Paying miners really only solves half the problem, though it's the much more immediate problem.

I'm not so worried about the size once it's on the harddisk. What concerns me is the bandwidth requirements to download it. Does internet bandwidth follow something similar to moore's law? I don't think it does as i've seen 1MBps for the same price for a rather long time. At least where i live..

Along with hard drive space, internet speeds are increasing at a more and more rapid rate everyday.

It is possible, but bitcoin is a pretty historic idea, so maybe it will still hold value after who knows how many years! o_0

When Bitcoin becomes an integral part of global commerce, it'll be in everyone's interest to maintain its integrity. Maybe companies like Coinbase would launch a few thousand microsatellites into orbit to run full nodes. I don't know.

What I do know is that there is no future in which the average Joe consumer is "being their own bank" by holding their savings in a cold wallet on some old dusty netbook running Ubuntu, so I doubt most people will be running full nodes either. The option exists, which is the important part, but if Bitcoin is to succeed, we can't expect the whole of society to suddenly become tech savvy.

So yeah, companies with a stake in Bitcoin will make sure these things are taken care of. Maybe it'll be part of Bitcoin insurance or a bank fee? You pay a certain amount of money and part of that goes to running a full node on your behalf.

im not worried about block chain sizes.

1.5 years ago the block chain was 8GB. now its 11.. not sure where the OP is getting 10 fold per year from but he is simply wrong in every way imaginable.

at the moment an average of under half of each block is full. in most cases its only 10-20%. if you do your maths of 1mb block per 10 minutes

(6 per hour, 144 per day, 52,500 per year) that is the maximum growth per year if EVERY block was filled right to the top.

52GB per year means in 10 years thats half a terrabyte. wow that only $90 for hard drive at todays prices or even cheaper in a couple years.

so i see atleast 10 years time the maximum storage usage of the block chain is half a terrabyte.

hang on thats 10 years away, i remember just 10 year ago complaining that a 2GB game was extreme.. now look at the new COD:ghosts 30GB.. and no one complains.

this is more evidence that in 10 years hard drives of multiple terrabytes will be cheap, that internet speeds will be alot faster today and no one will complain..

the people that worry about the future are the same people that worry about alien invasions, or that miners in the year 2140 wil revolt and cease mining as there is no more block reward. my reply to them is. stop day dreaming about a future thats too far away to be a problem and probably wont affect you anyways

Um... a year and a half ago, the blockchain size was ~1GB. It's currently over 12GB. https://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

Once max block size is being frequently touched, the limits will be raised again. The blockchain size is already an issue, and running a full node in areas where bandwidth is capped is practically impossible. Satellite ISP, for example, has a ~40GB cap in the US. The blockchain will exceed that size in around a year, possibly less - and that doesn't include the much higher amount of bandwidth consumed relaying transactions and blocks. It's increasingly the case that you can't run a full node unless you live in a city in a country where bandwidth caps aren't allowed by consumers (or maybe the government).

i am sure btc will evolve soon, and will be here even 100 yrs from now in some kind of shape

In some kind of shape, yes.  But most likely it will be in the shape of another alt coin.  But if it does survive and become THE cryto coin, and survives 100 years from now, only the most elite will own even 1 BTC by then.

Im already in this boat. I live in the sticks with wireless EVDO (think 3G) for internet.. no cable or DSL out here. its currently capped at 10 GB per month. luckily Im grandfathered in from 2007 with unlimited bandwidth but others on EVDO or satellite may be out of luck, they wouldnt even be able to pull the current blockchain in one shot.

:D Exact same issue here. 0-100kb/s generally, with some days having odd 300-400kb/s times. Luckily, near a highway. 4G is supposed to be coming around fairly soon. Though... I've been hearing that for about a year. I don't think many people realize just how many people in the rural US (which is most of the US) are stuck with dial-up, satellite, or 3G (*maybe* 4G, though it's about as likely there's only "2.5G" or just no mobile data solution) if they're a bit more up-to-date on the whole "technology craze." Dial-up's no longer usable in this media-heavy Internet, and satellite's too expensive for most (on top of being extremely restrictive), so there're tens of millions in the US without Internet at all. Being in a rural area doesn't just make Bitcoin difficult to use, but the whole Internet is slow and frequently returning time-out errors. Most people just aren't going to deal with that. The Internet obviously didn't die from becoming increasingly bandwidth-demanding, but web developers and designers are very conscious about minimizing data required. The increase rate of bandwidth-demand is many factors lower than that of Bitcoin.

I don't think that's a Bitcoin-killing problem on its own, but I think Bitcoin's way ahead of its time, and I seriously doubt infrastructure's ability to catch up (in most places, it's already heavily-strained). FiOS has been around for, what, ten years? It's deployed only in the largest of cities, and many large cities still lack it. Even then, we're talking 300mb/s absolute max. Max speeds actually offered are ~37.5mb/s down. With a 200GB blockchain, we're talking about an absolute minimum download speed of ~1 1/2 hours. By that time, FiOS will probably be available in all major cities. By the time it's available in minor cities, we're probably talking a 20TB blockchain (unless there's a push against increasing the block size limit, instead finally allowing transaction fees to increase). At that point, the absolute minimum download speed is almost a week. A cable connection would be Hellish (>18 days on the fastest of cable connections, which'll probably be more common by that time), and the fastest DSL connections simply couldn't keep up. The only reasonable way to transfer the blockchain would be physically mailing external hard drives.

No matter what % of data can be pruned - unless that's >95% or the % increases with time up to 99.99999%+, full nodes are going to become more centralized, and they're going to be only in major cities, and they'll be extremely expensive to maintain, which isn't something Bitcoin's prepared to deal with. Bitcoin's been exploding in popularity, but the number of nodes isn't keeping up. Proportional to price, the number of full nodes on the network is spiraling downward, though it's still currently in pretty darn good shape (~190K active full nodes, which has slipped from ~250K active full nodes at the end of November). In September (keeping in mind, lite clients were just as well-known back them), price was ~$150 with ~100K full nodes - so ~667 nodes per $ in price. With price at ~$900, we have those 190K full nodes - so ~211 nodes per $ in price.

ETA: I'm not trying to suggest there's currently any immediate threat to the integrity of Bitcoin. Even 10K nodes wouldn't be particularly worrying, unless the trend continues downward from that point. I think the situation's definitely worth monitoring, though.

"Bitcoin will probably be dead within 6 years."

In 6 years, devs will come up with solution on how to trim blockchain. As simple as that.

30 billion!?   Lol......how many people do you think there is here on earth?   ???


Hint.....your WAY off!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

He stated that a 10x increase it's impossible already , and he pointed that fact already. Did you read his entire post?

Yes,  I read it.  There must of been a user or two on my ignore list preventing me from seeing all the posts in their entirety or I overlooked it. I thought it was a crazy post.   Lol