Bitcoin Forum

It's a tragic legend unfortunately true.

I live far away from fellow Linux hackers and the concrete jungles that sport 100 Mbps downlinks. To get to here you must to venture into the mountains and rally down dirt road to where the wireless signals come and go. If you ever feel curious enough to come out this far, don't be alarmed by the smell when you stop. It's just the fresh cow dung smoking off your exhaust.

I've attempted to get started with Bitcoin before. Bit Faucet had graciously donated 0.05 BTC (http://blockexplorer.com/address/1755hNAZxdyspUkSyMBmEwsx2kG64vhZ3R) to me many months ago that I've been eagerly waiting for to appear in my client. And no, I haven't been downloading it all this time. In my fleeting interest I rightfully lost determination in downloading the entire block chain over my slow connection.

Now the block chain is an order of magnitude larger.

So determined again I've began redownloading the block chain. It's received roughly 200 MB so far (if you have a 10 Mbps connection, that's like waiting for 35 GB). In a few weeks it should be fully downloaded. Anyway, this is long enough. I just wanted to dispel the legend that dial-up is dead as disco. Or am I the only one that sees horses and code as part of a normal day?

P.S. An idea for you entrepreneurs: a service that mails the block chain on DVDs to would-be users with impatience or slow internet connections. And I do mean mail and not IP over Avian Carriers. It's -20 C right now.

P.P.S. As I finished writing this the transaction has showed up in my client with 400 confirmations. Perfect timing!

Cool story bro. What state are you from?

While it is true that the RFC for IP over Avian Carriers never tackled environmental issues like your -20°C weather, heavy snowstorms, hunting season, and the like, our ground-breaking proprietary extensions to the protocol should make the delivery possible: we send your bird carriers with FedEx!

Implementing out protocol extension, the transmission link will be established...
Unless it won't, see this guy's video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wpkbYL7wFA&feature=related
That may or may not have been one of our ostrich messengers sent out to deliver an urgent marriage proposal made by one of our clients via Internet Messaging.
126 bytes sent, 0 received, and we never saw that bird again. As a matter of fact, I don't recollect hearing from that particular client again either...

Should your organization prove unable to implement our extension for any reason, we also offer reliable, if somewhat slower, solutions based on the vanilla version of the standard.
Please use the mii-tool-avian to reduce the desired link speed and we'll send penguin carriers right away.
Persistent buggers, those penguins. Just make sure to have enough fish when your blockchain is received :)

On a more serious note: if you're in the middle of fraking Amazonian Forest, a thin client might be the solution for you. The blockchain remains in the cloud and does not have to be downloaded and synced.
Naturally, there are security implications to this approach as nothing in life is free.

Some allow you to control your private keys - this would be the best solution. Also, if you are mining it should work fine because of the low bandwidth requirements (for the most part) of a miner. I would be interested however to know how well this actually works over dialup.

If you trust some entrepreneur to mail you the block chain - why not just trust some wallet system which uses a remote blockchain?

The electrum client sounds like it should be just the thing for you.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53858

Thanks for clarifying that rjk. I admit I was being too vague.
There still are implications though... you're giving up some of the control to a third party.

Never-ever trust a client admitting to storing private keys server-side, not after the MyBitcoin fiasco!



For anyone interested in the matter, here is the RFC document establishing a standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on avian carriers http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html)
The following extension is even better introducing QOS! http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2549.html (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2549.html)

The client can verify the block chain.

Electrum is not a bad idea though.

I've heard that - but would love to see the definitive argument for why someone couldn't supply a fake blockchain with a relatively low difficulty and lead your client to think their easily mined blocks are the real thing.
I know there are 'checkpoints' so presumably a nefarious miner would need quite a bit of hash power to reduce the difficulty in his evil-tailed chain in any reasonable length of time.
I don't yet see why this evil chain wouldn't  verify just fine with the client.
I guess this is a question for the bitcoin stackexchange.

edit: perhaps the thing is that this evil chain could still never be longer than the real one(?) - so the client would notice that
Sorry for sidetracking!

You can only pass off an evil chain as the real thing if you also isolate them from the network.  If they connect to a valid node, they will use the longest chain available, which is always the valid chain.

Ok - that makes sense thanks.
edit: not that I understand why some clock adjustment on the evil chain miner machines couldn't make the low-difficulty evil-tail chain longer

It's not that easy; it is more like "the most difficult chain" that is used. The hashes in the blocks also have a difficulty; Bitcoin can see the blocks were easy even if you time warp while you are generating them.

56k dialup gets about 12MB an hour in downloading compressed files. I have split a downloadable blockchain (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=51456) into 100MB parts with very high compression; that would still take 8 hours of continuous downloading per file x 6 parts.

When we speak about "longer blockchain is the valid one" we means "the one hardest to do". Difficulty matter.

A blockchain with 1 block at 1 million difficulty is worth much much more than one with 100 blocks at difficulty 100. The client will recognise the first one as the valid one and ignore the second one.

Hi,

I think the best way of solving this is to rent a VPS (can be quite cheap), SSH to it which uses almost no bandwidth and then remotely run your wallet on that.

Good luck with your 56k BitCoin adventure!

A sobering reminder of the need for thin clients.  I hope we will never move away from the standard client containing the entire blockchain... but we do need thin clients for some things.

Thin clients, and the algorithm also allows entries involving addresses which have an available balance of zero to be "pruned" out of the block chain.  Assuming the statistics I saw last year on how many empty addresses there are still hold true, finishing implementing that would quarter the size of the current chain.

Pruning is only done on end client's side!
If you downloaded a pruned chain, that would amount to trusting other nodes that the pruned-out transactions were all legit.
There is no place for this kind of trust on the protocol level.
You still download the whole block chain, verify each and every block, and then - trusting only yourself - prune out some of the transactions.

nice story.

There should be a paying service that mails you the blockchain. For example you would pay $10 and you get the entire blockchain on a DVD delivered at home. Even if you have a decent connection, downloading the entire blockchain will get more and more tiresome as the network grows.

+1 for mailing the blockchain.

I can provide this from a UK address if anyone needs this.

How can we provide an md5sum from a third party if the size is constantly changing?

The other option is pay for a VPS; it can be very cheap.

I'd like to see more blockchain thirdparty hosting

You don't need to md5sum it.  The client will verify it, and if new blocks come in as usual, it was good.

I'd be willing to mail a DVD of the current chain from the USA for actual postage cost.  Add like $3 if you want it on M*Disc.

Agreed. Wait until the new lite overlay network and lite clients are developed. Dialup should not be a big problem at that point.

Just curious, would it be possible to keep the blockchain on a server while keeping your wallet on your computer?

What about someone hosting a super compressed copy of the chain that gets updated every couple days or something. Would at least take less time to download, I'd think.

See post #12 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=58249.msg687737#msg687737); still 600mb with the highest compression available. Cryptographic hashes are random and not very compressible.