Bitcoin Forum

I wonder, how scalable is the Blockchain in terms of size of data. It grows every day and the speed of data processing on the server side must inevitably go down. Am I right? Where can I read about this? I'm sure there was some analysis done already. Thanks!

Why do you believe that the increase in size of Blockchain can cut down its data processing speed? It has been witnessed that whenever the size has increased, the community have always come up with some solution every time and dealt with the issues. Those were the times when it was possible that the speed of data processing may have gone down due to blockage in mempool, but this is not the case any more. People are using different nature of technology i.e.; SegWit and helping the network save both energy and data consumption whereas going up with the speeds it is achieving at a daily pace.

Blockchains do not scale on-chain globally, decentralized ones at least (and that is, the Bitcoin blockchain, the rest aren't decentralized). In order to keep the whole thing from collapsing upon itself, there's a fee market. If you want prioritize your transaction, pay an higher fee.

With clever tricks like segwit you can keep squeezing on-chain transactions in for cheaper prices, but the future is second layer scaling. You cannot exponentially keep raising the blocksize, it has to be lineal growth so it's predictable, beside the fact that the game theory doesn't allow you to hardfork every time someone feels like "we need to scale".

A blockchain that's merely a chain of blocks running in a datacenter might be very scalable, and very fast. Like Paypal.


That's the cost the server should bear.


If asking about Bitcoin, I believe the question should be, "what's the maximum block size can the network bear today, without centralizing the network? - If a hard fork was a non-issue."

Precisely, the reason you guarantee the primary doesn't fall is by protocol solidification, derived from a de-facto reached decentralization which Only Bitcoin has reached, organically (no other way). You build on top of this, so if what you build falls, you have a place to fall back. Granted, the impact on price and hashrate would be felt, however, Bitcoin would outlive a fatal second layer error/exploit, as well as a fatal segwit error/exploit. This requires many years of studying Bitcoin and understanding the fine layers of game theory around it. By the time you reach this point, you may have lost half of your BTC stack in a variety of shitcoins which promised you to solve whatever you considered to be problem but proven to be a solution in practice.

Scalability has a capacity to change in size and scale by measuring the ability of a process, network, software, or organization to grow and manage increased demand. Blockchain is a potential technology that disrupts and improvises industries and traditionally centralized systems. Blockchain technology scale and processes transactions at speed, way above its alternatives with enhanced capabilities.

The size of the blockchain itself has no effect on the future transaction processing speed.

With p2p databases (no matter if blockchain, distributed hash tables or dynamo) one generally distinguishes between vertical and horizontal scaling.

Horizontal scaling means adding more nodes. Since in a blockchain network every transaction has to be processed by every node, there is no added value.
Vertical scaling means a larger maximum block size. This would increase the throughput, but at the same time the blockchain would quickly increase in size.
(and a larger blockchain usually implies a more centralized system)

Newbies should start reading/learning about what's important about Bitcoin, its blockchain, and learn why the decisions taken by the Core developers is the better path. Security, decentralization, censorship-resistance, and finality.

and yet core are the censors....
just look at how many bips and idea's they have censored
just look at how many dev teams they threw out the community

you have certainly drunk the core koolaid

Censorship-resistance, and security of Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency through decentralization, and your complaints about a group of developers who reject some "ideas" are two different things.

Why? You want me to drink the Roger Ver kool aid?

1. by a group even being able to reject an idea before the whole community get to try it. is censorship
2. by a group being able to ban other teams off the network because they dont agree, is censorship
3. by you thinking that a person thats not core hugging must be opposition, is censorship
sorry but i dont follow ver.. but i do love how you show your colours of your desire for censorship by trying to say anyone that doesnt love core must be in some other group.
in bitcoin there should not be one controling implementation/group. there should be no banning other idea's off the network before new rules even get a chance of find consensus.. purely to push through one groups goals without opposition

Blockchains do not scale. If you want to keep them decentralized (which I think is the whole point of even having a blockchain to begin with).

You can scale them by building layers on top of the base blockchain, which is very similar to how traditional payment rails work.

So side chains or solutions like the Lightning Network are the way of scaling blockchains, without actually scaling the base layer.

Despite the development side going fairly well in my opinion over the years. You shouldn't blindly follow anyone, and should always be looking to challenge, and better a system such as Bitcoin. They aren't always going to be making the right decisions for Bitcoin as I think that's somewhat impossible. Fortunately, the consensus usually picks a fairly good option, but maybe not always the best.

people say it cant scale due to storage(facepalm)

in the 1990's kodak said digital photography wont scale because a floppy disk is only 1.4mb
today, digital media smaller then the size of a postage stamp(24x physical size smaller then floppy)
https://i.imgur.com/HmyGjiX.png
and each microxd stores 1,024,000mb

I definitely agree with Franky that storage in the future isn't going to be an issue. Storage continues to get better (bigger), faster, and cheaper. A few years ago a terabyte cost a lot of money when they first got released, but we are seeing them reduce to almost nothing these days, and everyone even older people who don't use computers that often have 1TB hard drives. At the moment, we don't see storage becoming a problem, and the evolution of storage isn't showing any indications that its going to slow down.

a block is only 1.3mb every 10 minutes.
come on, even you know hard drives have no issue with it.

as for the IBD... thats not a hard drive or internet issue. thats a programming issue. the only complaint people actually have about the IBD is that they have to download it before they can even use bitcoin.
its not a 'my computers gonna blow up' experience.
its a 'twiddling thumbs' experience

this can be solved by letting users rpc-api request their peers to fetch them a small utxo set of just the addresses needed or even an entire UTXO set, so that users can then make transactions, and the IBD becomes a secondary background event rather than a 'must do before use'

if you really think a blockchain running at 1.3mb per 10 minutes is somehow clogging up hard drive performance of hard drives of 250mb PER SECOND then there is something wrong with your 30yo hard drive. maybe time to get something made this side of the millenium. even basic simple maths puts the difference of ~1.3mb/10min vs 250mb/sec at a ~12,000x multiple

which was another laugh i made years ago when core refused a base block of 2mb.
.. and a further laugh when they went for 4mb weight, which debunked their own excuse for not doing 2mb base

Yeah  I would like to see blocks go the 2x route every once in a while.

As for being able to process this not a problem.

the ryzen 3900x is cheap  and fast  with a lot of processing.

I have a new pcie ssd  it is smoking fast.

and 10gb ethernet is right around the corner.

So I can see us going up to 32mb size blocks.

There might even be a few people refurbishing old servers with plenty of RAM to hold the entire blockchain. There are servers now with 1 TB of RAM. You could run a full node in a RAM drive. In a few years, that will only increase and drop in price as well.

But there's no need, SSD's work fine. In fact, HDDs work fine right now. If you're some sort of payment processor you'll need more processing power to handle all the transactions, but that's outside the base layer or blockchain already.

The main problem with new computers is they all have backdoors, at the hardware level. With Intel you hve the "Intel Management Engine" (IME), and with AMD you have the "Platform Security Processor". IME is more understood, with PSP we don't even know anything about it. Both have proprietary blobs and cannot be flashed in current computers. So While the 3900x is awesome in it's performance, you have the privacy problem. This forces people to use old computers to run nodes.

There's also the consensus problem of course. It seems to be rather impossible to manage super consensus. This while bad for scaling, is good as the store of value proposal, since you want the thing to be immutable.

too many people think bitcoin will in 20-40 years ned to run on $1000 desktop computer or $100,000 servers.
just like they thought mining bitcoin would go from CPU to needing a $100,000 server
the reality is you can get something that mines btc the physical size of a shoe box that is 1billion times faster than a cpu/gpu, thus no server scenario. as people can still individually buy asics and run them from home

same will happen with node hardware. people will start producing hardware specific for being a node. with th benefit of not having to worry about hash competition of trying to outpace other nodes
just take how fast mining hardware changed.
2013. GPU $600 1ghash
2019. ASIC $27 1,000,000ghash ($1430/53thash)

just imagine how many transactions can be verified using an asic chip designed specifically to validate signatures. and a device had multiple chips to allow multiple transaction validity at once.

This. Im talking about privacy problems: Modern hardware is increasingly less privacy friendly and are attacking this vector with each update. You can't trust anything anymore, even at the hardware level. Im not talking about performance.

So it doesn't matter how fast and efficient your brand new machine is, when it's spoofing your transactions and profiling you. Result = people is being forced to use old hardware.

thats where airgapped wallets will be the future.
imagine a phone as a hardware wallet where the only communication is sending a signed transaction via displaying it as a qr code on screen.
the retailer views the qr code and obviously if the destination address is spoofed the retailer wont accept it to broadcast
common sense, why would a retailer broadcast the customers singed tx if the retailer aint the recipient of funds

its like olden days credit card validation. if a card doesnt pass a luhncheck (math test giving a checksum of the long card number) then the retailer wont even bother connecting to the bank to even bother checking the balance or authorising the payment

also by only ever displaying signed tx, there is no way to transmit the private key thus safer than current wallets. even if a chip is vulnerable if the only display is a signed tx, its not going to cause harm
in short there is a solution to your problem,
i see people using home pc as their networking device to grab a UTXO to scan into a airgapped hand device where the hand device is the wallet

 but this topic wants to talk about speed/size scaling the blocks/validation. which has nothing to do with private key security

We already have Trezors and so on, and they have been compromised before. Nothing can beat a proper computer where you have total control of everything, of course you need expert security at Linux level and so on.. I dont see a replacement in terms of a hardware device for this that exists right now and nobody seems to be doing this anytime soon.

In any case what we are talking about is running nodes, that is why is related to this topic. Running a node is not having a wallet, it's having both, so you can broadcast them through your node which has verified the blockchain is legit. And so here is the problem: In order to remain safe you have to use old hardware, thus we are limited to that old hardware if you want full security for your node.

1. trezors flaw is that it needs to connect to a computer. and then use the computers GUI to log-in.[keyboard logger risk][phishing risk] people have made many phishing/virus schemes that pretend to say 'device issues please input seed' to steal your funds because they broadcast the seed to the hacker.
yes gen1 hardware wallets are crap.
but this does not make using generic computers better.

2. microprocessor technology is evolving so much that it wont require desktop computers at $1000 with a 20" lcd screen and a 15inch keyboard and mouse to opperate. it will be devices the size of your phone that in the future will have terrabytes of storage that cost well under $1k

3. as for wallet security
instead of a mouse/keyboard. imagine having a smartwatch that stores the private key and only ever.. yes ill say it again only ever displays a QR code of a signed tx. and you sweep your arm over a reader much like scanning a can of beans barcode at a grocery checkout.
no need to type in seeds[keyboard logger risk], no need to have on screen prompts asking you to log into accounts[phishing risk].

its one thing many people dont like buying things online and still prefer cash and physical stores. they simply dont like having crucial fund stealable information linked to the internet. so ofcourse separating the tx signing function from the blockchain validating function is the future of security.

you will see in the future yes 'node' will have the facility to broadcast new transactions, but the security of signing it will be things like wearables and mobile devices. after all who wants to walk into a walmart with a desktop pc because they have to, which is what your presuming by saying people ned to use old hardware.
this means people dont need to trust their own node or anyone elses node such as retailer checkout scanners to broadcast their payment
as the node never asks, and never gets the private key/seed

and now for the comedy of some assertions you are trying to push.. it seems as if you are trying to say that blockchains should not scale (yea we know the COREporate reason behind that) and then try to push a myth that computers post say 2005(ill let your friends myth up the practical year) no computer i safe for bing a wallet and such blockchain tech is forever, for the next billions years stuck behind some mythical security risk of said year.

it makes me laugh when people try to say blockchains should not scale due to security risks. when there are EASY work arounds/fixes to the problem. but the COREporate plan is make excuses not to innovate/scale

The problem with microwearables and small stuff is that you can't properly manage something like an interface similar to Coin Control for real control of what you are doing with your money. What you are talking about at least how I envision it, wouldn't feature that. So you would still need a proper computer, with Linux, doing all of that, and right now, we are stuck with the same old CPU's. And as far as ETFbitcoin said, im aware of certain "exploits" in order computers, however, what you can exploit in an old computer is nothing compared to the modern CPU's which come with pre-installed at the hardware level OS's and work even when you turn them down.

As far as the "COREporate" thing you are missing the point. Im not claiming the blocksize must not be raised to LN has a point. All im saying is, the game theory doesn't check in in order to raise the blocksize, not now, not anytime soon, it will just not happen, even if all Core devs wanted to, that's irrelevant. This is part of being actually decentralized. Immutabiliy of the core (not Core) protocol is a valuable thing, so the loss of an use case for grocery-making is compensate by a long shot, by having an immutable, unconfiscable, uncensorable asset, unique on the planet, as the Bitcoin experiment cannot be replicated.

1. smart watches screens can handle displaying a 'to:' and 'amount:'. smart watches also can be voice command. touch screen, there are many ways to input simple text. basically if you take a phone and remove the circuitry for bluetooth, wifi, gsm, 4g,5g and use a smaller screen. all the same processing a phone can do a smartwatch can do.

2. if you think CPU's have exploits then it doesnt matter what OS is running so put your 'has to be linux' mantra aside aswell., the exploit you presume to be concerned with is hardware level.
      yes i still laugh you want to keep bitcoin held back due to PC fears.. whats next go call EA/rockstar and tell them to stop releasing new games due to CPU risks people can use to exploit peoples credit card details when they buy ingame purchases. go on tell rockstar to not make the next GTA unless its only Linux based runtime. watch them laugh.
whats that i then here, OH no netflix should stop taking payment over the internet for monthly subscriptions.. oh no youtube should stop
paying its vloggers, stop taking payments from advertisers. omg the world has to stop taking payments..
(see how silly that sounds when your thought process is expanded)

3. adding to point 1. wearables will be the secure wallet to spend and pc's will b the nodes to broadcast signed spends and to monitor the network. again thinking people need to avoid wearables and lug around a 2005 desktop PC when they go shopping is completely ridiculous, but you seem to think thats the future.
whats next trust second hand pc's bought on ebay,, remember to ask yourself where are people to find these now outdated pc's you wish people to DOWNGRADE to. as they cant be now freshly manufactured as you would start saying they too have exploits added

here is the future i see. hardware companies making motherboards with tx&block validation asic chips on them, instead of generic CPU's that way every joule of power sparking across the board is used 100% for being a network node.
imagine 1chip the size of a penny can handle ~350,000,000 sha functions /sec right now. thus something around the size of a raspberry pi
can do all the processes of signature validation and txid hashing and block validation. oh and the price would be under $400

and the wearable is the wallet people can carry on their wrist without needing to lug around a decade old musty desktop pc. without having to worry about security. yea the node wont store private keys so no need for concerns about CPU exploits in anyway

but hey keep making the excuses that bitcoin shouldnt scale with your myths. its great comedy
by they way. saying bitcoin is unique and all that blah................ one word. altcoin

if you take away bitcoins advantage of being useful by pushing people into other networks like LN and altcoins. guess what. bitcoin becomes useless.. yes LN is not a bitcoin layer/feature/network.. its its own network trying to garner VC investors by playing off the fame of bitcoin, whilst trying to remove bitcoins purpose
have a nice day

My opinion is unchanged, further scaling can be possible only through market mechanisms (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5109561). Actually, in the light of block space requirements brought by quantum threat, these mechanisms would merely preserve the status quo.


Thanks, this kind of information isn't plastered everywhere for obvious reasons and I have had to dig again into the latest achievements of the big brother.

Isn't that a big if every node upgrades's their Bitcoin Core software, and their hardware in lockstep? Wouldn't it be better to have a static node requirement for the network, to let it scale out as the new hardware/faster internet enter?