We're not "obfuscating" anything.
The danger you mention is comparable to the danger of running a piece of open source software without having previously read the entire source code and acquired a full understanding of how it works, before trusting to run it on your wallet.dat.

Thankfully, we can rest assured that a large enough number of people have already made such validation, as it's open to anyone to do it. Any attempt to insert bogus data, either on the source or on the blockchain, will be quickly spot. In the case of running full nodes particularly, there will always be more people capable of doing it - and actually doing it - than there are people capable of fully understanding Bitcoin source code.

I agree with that Bitcoin Magazine article that says that in 20 years, everybody will be capable of running a full node. The blockchain grows linearly once the adoption rate stabilizes. Hardware resources grow exponentially.


Precisely. It's extremely difficult to lie to a SPV node. You need to be the only one it connects to, and still all you'll manage to do is hide stuff from it, not "invent" fake transactions.

I meant it works in a p2p fashion, not in a client-server fashion, as it connects to multiple nodes. It's "decentralized" if you prefer.

You just need to point Bitcoin-QT to your data dir. I think it's -datadir=... or something.

Keep backups of your wallet, of course.
No need to back up the blockchain, there are already plenty of copies around the world.

I'd say ultimately it's the main services (MtGox, Bitpay, BitInstant, BitcoinStore, WalletBit, Silk Road etc) that will decide. If they all stay at the same side of the fork, that will likely be the side that "wins", regardless of Gavin or even miners' will (most miners would just follow the money).
Of course that services have a strong interest in staying on the branch that's more professionally supported by developers, so yeah, if most of the core team goes to one side, we could predict most of these services would too.

Blockchain growth is only exponential as long as Bitcoin usage growth is exponential. Whenever usage stabilizes, blockchain growth will be linear, and bandwidth consumption will stabilize, while storage resources and connection speeds will remain growing exponentially. So, at most, there will be a medium term future in which running a full node requires a professional amount of resources, but as resources keep growing exponentially and Bitcoin consumption of said resources keeps growing linearly, eventually everybody will be able to run full nodes on their phones.

And remember, for sending and receiving money safely, you can use a SVP client. Those require much less resources. You can run a full p2p SVP client on your phone right now.

(Btw, if I'm not mistaken in the fast calculations I've just made, it would take almost 200 years to reach 10Tb by growing 144Mb per day... I know this growth rate will increase beyond these 144Mb, but from where do you take this "soon we'll need 10Tb" figure? What's "soon"?)

Since 0.8 it became perfectly possible to run Bitcoin with its data dir in an USB disk, so I'm currently doing that to save space in my main disk (which is quite small).

Concerning your question, It's currently growing at no more than 250Kb per block, with ~144 blocks per day that should be at most ~36Mb of daily growth (it's actually less than that, not every block's hitting 250Kb). After May 15th, that growth rate might rise. It will take a hard-fork change for it to rise above 144Mb per day though, due to the 1Mb cap.

You can follow the total size here: http://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size

Repeating what was already said once again: you can safely transact without being a full node. On the other hand, what's the point in being a full node if you can't even transact since there's no more room in the blockchain for your transactions?

Great post Mike! You should create a topic with it in the OP, as it deserves more than to be buried here in the 7th page of this topic.



Hum, are you sure about that? I'd like to know what happened to the market price of gold in US during the ban of the 30s...
If Bitcoin is aggressively banned everywhere, then I'd agree with you. But if it's still allowed in a significant number of places, I don't think so.

You can also show all pages and then use Ctrl+F....

Se você passa o dia fazendo day-trade, aí de fato não vejo outra alternativa a deixar a quantidade de BTCs com as quais você negocia no site.

Mas quantas pessoas realmente vivem de day-trade? Não acho que seja uma porcentagem tão alta. E mesmo os que fazem, não precisam ter todas as moedas no site num dado momento, e podem "repatriá-las" sempre que pararem de "trabalhar".

Não acompanhei todos os detalhes, mas não pude deixar de notar a quantidade de brasileiros nervosos com o incidente no Mercado Bitcoin. Vi gente dizendo ter até 2k BTC estocados lá.

Porra galera. Vocês não aprenderam nada com todo o histórico de incidentes do tipo até aqui?

Não pretendo questionar a idoneidade ou a competência do Leandro César, até porque as ignoro. Mas, até onde eu sei, o serviço era operado unicamente por ele, e estocava uma Hot Wallet sem multisig. Por mais competente que ele seja, era ele sozinho contra todos os hackers mal intencionados do planeta! Todo hacker que merece o nome sabe o que são Bitcoins, e conhece portanto os serviços que possuem hot wallets. Esses serviços serão sistematicamente visados! Seres humanos cometem erros, e era só questão de tempo até o Leandro cometer um e deixar um ataque passar.

Mas o que é pior é que isso já aconteceu N vezes nos sites gringos. Vocês não acompanham o que acontece fora do Brasil? Acham que o mundo tupiniquim tem alguma diferença fundamental, que o que acontece fora do país não vai se reproduzir no Brasil? Por que diabos vocês mantinham quantias significativas de bitcoins numa eWallet?

Aprender com os próprios erros é normal e parte da vida. Mas muito melhor é aprender com os erros dos outros. E, nesse caso, oportunidades não faltaram! Fiquem espertos, povo!

Espero realmente que o Leandro consiga se recuperar e reembolsar uma quantidade significativa do montante de seus clientes. Espero que a principal (única?) casa de câmbio brasileira seja restabelecida. Mas espero, principalmente, que todo mundo aprenda a lição de uma vez por todas e não estoquem bitcoins numa eWallet por mais tempo do que o estritamente necessário.

E sobre como estocar de maneira segura suas as próprias Bitcoins, não faltam tópicos nesse fórum explicando (paperwallets, offline wallets etc...)

The following link takes into account both inflation and price fluctuations: http://bitcoin.zinetsolutions.be/

I think it's nice to keep the topic title pointing to the country we haven't yet passed, not even for a while.

I find this "enhanced-SWIFT" aspiration for Bitcoin so limited compared to everything it can do.... but anyway, I'll stop here in order not to derail this thread.

On Lack of applications, that's a non-issue. The amount of applications Bitcoin has today is orders of magnitude higher than what it had 2 years ago. And it will likely keep rising.

On Scalability, it's perfectly possible to make it scalable. Of course, that will likely provoke a fork, with some people gripping strongly to the unscalable version. That will provoke price turbulence, bad press, but in the end, the scalable Bitcoin will rise out of all this mess as it has done before.

On Losses, it's a true problem, but it will become much less relevant once devices like Trezor are easily available.

Regulation is definitely the strongest of the risks he cites. It's unpredictable how far governments can go.

All "WU offices" I've ever seen were either cyber cafés or post offices.

What they're worth and how they're supposed to be used is not up to any single individual or group to decide.
Dust may be used as a way to send messages. Dust may be used in Smart Property contracts. Whatever.

My point is that what you're making here is a "judgement of value", and that's not up to the Bitcoin infrastructure to make. It's the users that should choose how they spend their coins. As long as they pay for the service being provided (and whether they're paying enough or not is up to miners to decide), and as long as the infrastructure is protected against attacks (DoS), everything is fine.

Please don't embed judgments of value in Bitcoin's backend.


I thought it was you that came up with the concept of standard and non-standard transactions.... it was there since the beginning?

Bitcoin can surely scale. It can be larger than Visa in less than 5 years, if there's enough demand.
True, some people seem determined to do what they can to prevent that from happening. I think we'll end up having a fork at some point. Some people will remain on the old fork where no more than 7tps can happen, and others will migrate to the new, scalable Bitcoin. WU would have to be on the scalable branch, of course.

Exactly what I thought. But it's indeed hard to believe such a large corporation would have the guts to restructure itself this way. Many internal branches would have to be cut. There's lots of politics inside these large corporations. The people in charge would have to be very bold and ready to make lots of people very unhappy.

M1 = bank accounts + cash.

D&T made the same remark, to which I responded above. You'd had to filter which you would relay, and then priority vs fees kicks in. The only difference is that it's not a binary decision (has/hasn't enough fees to get relayed), it's just a way of sorting what gets relayed from what does not. You may end up relaying a transaction that today would not be relayed if there's enough "room" for it.


That's nice, better than what is done today and better than what I was saying above. Much more flexible. Nice.


Why not applying the same logic you described above? (they only get dropped if they can't fit in your memory pool)