Howdy again.
Okay, still trying to get a handle on this stuff. My question is, as the topic said, what's going to happen a few years down the road with the blockchain? It's already pretty damn big. At what point will it overwhelm the average computer/network? Ever?
Hopefully not.
Will computer/network capabilities continue to keep ahead of it?
That's the general assumption.
Won't it grow at an exponential rate if the great unwashed continues to adopt BtC at an ever increasing rate?
With the current protocol? No. The protocol sets a maximum block size of 1 megabyte. The protocol adjusts the mining difficulty automatically to keep the average rate of new block generation close to ten minutes.
This means that the blockchain shouldn't grow much faster than 6 megabytes per hour (52.6 gigabytes per year). At that rate it will take 19 years to fill a 1 terabyte drive. What are the odds that consumer storage capabilities will exceed 1 terabyte in the next 19 years?
I can afford ten, twenty or even fifty gigs to it, but if it ever hits a terrabyte, I'm going to go outside and play. It already takes five or ten minutes just for Armory to read the blockchain when I start it up.
Perhaps in the future there will be a lightweight wallet that provides security nearly as good as Armory.
One thing I don't understand is the number of confirmations that the blockchain seems to be clogged with. I have transactions a year old or so that have thousands of confirmations by now. Why is that necessary? Armory advises me to wait for six before I trust a transaction, so why the hell are there thousands? Isn't that extreme overkill? Aren't all those entries in the blockchain? Doesn't that bloat it a bit?
In the world of bitcoin, "confirmation" is just another way to say "a block added to the blockchain". Every time a new block is added to the blockchain with new transactions in it, all the transactions that are already embedded in older blocks are said to have "another confirmation". There isn't any new information stored for those old transactions, they just have one more block above them.
Another question concerns clients that don't need the whole blockchain saved to disk... Of course, they still have to "process" the whole blockchain, correct? When you first install such a client, it has to read the whole blockchain to see what in there is yours, right? Basically, such a client still reads the whole blockchain, it just doesn't save everything to disk, just what affects your account. Am I understanding that correctly?
It depends on the client, but in most cases yes.
Is there any advantage here other than saving a few gigs of disk space?
Faster start-up time? Reduced internet bandwidth use?
