Bitcoin Cloud Servers?

[Bungeebones]

I ran across this article about AWS (Amazon Web Services) where it describes the great lengths they are going to for acquiring data storage. This particle statement is what struck me as being especially applicable to Bitcoin:

Snowmobile aims to migrate massive datasets (think petabytes) to AWS. The argument for the hybrid cloud is that some workloads are just too ridiculous to move.

"Too ridiculous to move"! Isn't Bitcoin's blockchain already beyond that?

So, are there any Bitcoin cloud servers available or is it just a massive security risk that keeps such a thing from happening? I would think a shared or virtual server connected to a common blockchain database would be valuable?

[unamis76]

No, with current hardware, software and connections available, the blockchain isn't ridiculous to move and it's not expected it will become ridiculous, at least in near future.

There are already Bitcoin clouds, so to speak, I guess you can say that nodes on hosting services are the cloud of Bitcoin. And with that "common blockchain database" I assume you're suggesting there should be some kind of "seed" with the most recent blockchain... That won't work within Bitcoin. Although clients do check what they're downloading while syncing, would you like to have a single point of failure serving you the blockchain? If that computer becomes unreachable or offline, you'd just have no syncing or would have to rely on other nodes (which is what happens now).

[calkob]

I think the current size of the blockchain is around 100GB, which is hardly unmovable, it takes a few days to download and considering the average computer is coming with 3-5TB hard drives it is hardly out of the reach of the average computer user.

[unamis76]

I think the current size of the blockchain is around 100GB, which is hardly unmovable, it takes a few days to download and considering the average computer is coming with 3-5TB hard drives it is hardly out of the reach of the average computer user.

Correct. Computers with SSD's, quad core processors, 6GB+ RAM and 30MB+ connections are also more and more common. I don't see the blockchain scaling so much that hardware won't be able to keep up.