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[SapphireSpire]

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[DannyHamilton]

For Bitcoin to be sustainable indefinitely, it can't have a blockchain that keeps growing forever

Why not?

or a money supply that shrinks to nothing.
- snip -
it's reasonable to predict that the entire money supply will eventually be lost.

Actually, that isn't very likely to happen.

In order to preserve the money supply, there must be a way to recover lost or abandoned values and I can't see a way of doing this without putting expiration dates on UTXOs to make owners spend them at least once within a period of time to prove to the network that they aren't lost or abandoned.

You are welcome to go create your own altcoin if you want to be able to steal from people.  I ireally don't think you're going to be able to get a consensus on your idea.  Without consensus, it isn't going to happen.

[theymos]

This is a very old idea which has been discussed to death.

People joined Bitcoin knowing that bitcoins would gradually be lost over time. This is an important part of how the Bitcoin currency works. Therefore, reassigning "lost" BTC would be extremely similar to increasing the money supply beyond 21 million, and so it is an absolutely prohibited change. Nothing that does this can ever rightly be called Bitcoin, no matter how much consensus it has. If we ever run low on satoshi, the solution will be to increase precision, not to add more satoshi.

Expiring very old UTXOs but not reassigning their value is acceptable, though. In fact, this can be done in a softfork. I think that doing this would be a good idea:
- If apparently-lost BTC is at risk of being recovered illegitimately due to cryptographic weaknesses. The release of so many lost coins would be a major blow to the the economy. Once it looks like ECDSA will only be secure for 5 more years or so, I think that a timer should be started to expire all ECDSA-secured UTXOs at the expected point at which they will become too insecure.
- If storing the UTXO set becomes a very major bottleneck for full nodes and there are no other good alternatives to UTXO expiration on the table. Several years of advance warning should be given before the first expiration.

[Duomo]

^ Hi theymos  

I agree, there isn't a point of allocation of lost bitcoins. The expansion and making up for the lost private keys of specific stated 21 million seems contrary to the values of what bitcoin was define as from the beginning, a finite source.  Instead of increasing the supply, adaptations should be made in order to deal with the issues that come in the future. The likelihood that all bitcoins will be and not regularly available in the market is false. There will be limited supply that is shrinking, but to say at some at time in the future, the use of bitcoin due to supply and demand constraints makes it useless is the polar opposite to the situation occurring presently right now before our eyes.

[Dabs]

How big is too big? By the time the blockchain is 1 terabyte, we would all be using 16 TB solid state drives or larger, like the one Samsung showed off this year.

People heavily invested into bitcoin will be running a separate server just to host their own full node.

[achow101]

How big is too big? By the time the blockchain is 1 terabyte, we would all be using 16 TB solid state drives or larger, like the one Samsung showed off this year.

People heavily invested into bitcoin will be running a separate server just to host their own full node.

The Bitcoin network can currently handle 7 transactions per second. At 250 bytes per transaction on average, the blockchain is growing at 1.75KB/s- easy peasy. But if we want a network that can handle a million transactions per second, the blockchain will grow at 250MB/s, 15GB/m, 900GB/h, 21.6TB/d. That's way too much data for most PCs and way beyond the typical bandwidth of most cable ISPs.

We aren't going to handle a million transactions per second. Not even visa, one of the biggest payment processors, handles that much. They only handle around 3000 transactions per second, so we should target that.

[Dabs]

We're not going to hit as much as Visa or Mastercard or any of the other credit cards anytime soon, at least not the main blockchain. Remember, there will be off-chain transactions as well, like with those online wallets and bitgo and even side chains.

What will most likely happen is that more people will switch to light SPV clients, or mobile clients that work with servers, or some other solution that does not required the whole blockchain on your device.

If a business or enterprise wants their own full node, they will have their own server, or have it hosted. The blockchain is only 60 GB today. It will probably be double that by the end of 2016 (120 GB), and maybe double that by end of 2017 (240 GB). We'll have more space by then, faster, and I predict the death of mechanical platter spinning hard drives too (especially when SSD prices come close to HDD prices.)

Samsung already sells 2TB SSDs.

Most enterprise servers now or dedicated solutions have terabytes of space available in multiple 15k RPM drives running on some form of RAID for speed and redundancy.

When those enterprises switch to SSDs, they will sell their HDDs cheaply (or destroy them, but they can always have the drives wiped and still sold.)

I'm actually looking to buy some off-leased servers for myself, I mean, they come with 32GB to 64GB DDR3 RAM, dual quad core Xeon processors (16 threads with hyper threading), all for below $800. Stuff that cost $5000 about 5 years ago.

[larry_vw_1955]

Expiring very old UTXOs but not reassigning their value is acceptable, though.

Well you're half way there. you just need to realize that reassigning their value is perfectly fine and in line with satoshi's vision of having a fixed supply. no more and no less. the original poster deserves more credit than he got. that's for sure.

[DannyHamilton]

satoshi's vision of having a fixed supply. no more and no less.

(emphasis added by me)

I don't see why we should care at all what "Satoshi's Vision" was.  He's not a god, and he hasn't been involved in Bitcoin for over a decade now.

However, since you seem to care so much about what Satoshi would think...  You're wrong.

6. When someone loses his wallet, will there be a way to recreate the lost coins in the system ? Else the 21 million maximum will not be correct.

6:
Those coins can never be recovered, and the total circulation is less.  Since the effective circulation is reduced, all the remaining coins are worth slightly more.  It's the opposite of when a government prints money and the value of existing money goes down.

(emphasis added by me)

Clearly, Satoshi INTENDED for lost coins to remain lost, and was NOT in favor of reassigning that value.

[Dabs]

The question now is, define "very old", and at what threshold or age do "old coins" expire and are no longer redeemable or spendable?

Most fiat bank accounts of the world have some sort of 10 year time limit on "dormant" accounts, but 10 years might be too short. Some have even shorter time periods, 3 years, 2 years, 1 year. Perhaps there could be some sort of fork (soft or hard) where "very old" unspent UTXOs are expired after a certain future time, like 10 years from now, but only if they are still stuck in legacy addresses. I think any coins in newer segwit addresses (or future taproot addresses) should never expire as some people may be holding on to them for the next several decades.

It is good practice for wallets to move coins every year or two but that's besides the point.

[DannyHamilton]

10 years might be too short.

Much too short.  There are a variety of very good reasons someone might not touch their bitcoins for more than a decade.

Perhaps there could be some sort of fork (soft or hard) where "very old" unspent UTXOs are expired

Like, an altcoin?  Sure.  Go ahead and create a steal-a-coin cryptocurrency where you lose your coins after a while.  Let see how many people actually want to use it.

but only if they are still stuck in legacy addresses. I think any coins in newer segwit addresses (or future taproot addresses) should never expire as some people may be holding on to them for the next several decades.

Why should legacy addresses be treated any differently?

It is good practice for wallets to move coins every year or two but that's besides the point.

Every year or two?  Why would that be a good practice?  Sounds like a bad idea to me.

[Dabs]

Like, an altcoin?  Sure.  Go ahead and create a steal-a-coin cryptocurrency where you lose your coins after a while.  Let see how many people actually want to use it.

Not an altcoin. Not a steal-a-coin crypto. A can-not-spend-very-old-coin bitcoin for really very old addresses which are not double hash protected. No one is stealing the coins, just marking them as unspendable after they have not been spent 10 years from now (so, some really old coins not moved in 20 years). It was just a suggestion and I have no problem with no one doing anything about them as the coins are unlikely to be spent at all if no one has moved them in the past 10, 11, or 12 years.

This would of course, require consensus and that means everyone agrees to it.


The longest time frame I've seen for fiat banks is 15 years of inactivity, they then mark those as dormant and can "escheat" the money to the state or central bank or whatever. There are procedures for claiming that money. Imagine your great grandfather opened an account in your name when you were a child, put in a few thousand dollars, and you never knew about it until today, some 50 years later.

Why should legacy addresses be treated any differently?

There are some early addresses older than the most recent legacy addresses that were not protected behind a hash of a hash, so those coins can be stolen if enough computing power is put to them. The later legacy addresses are protected by a hash of a hash, so the public keys are unknown until they are spent, for those addresses which are re-used, which is not recommended these days.

I think the earliest addresses have their public keys known? Kindly correct me if I am mistaken. My own first addresses were those hash behind a hash types.

It is good practice for wallets to move coins every year or two but that's besides the point.

Every year or two?  Why would that be a good practice?  Sounds like a bad idea to me.

Yeah, so you know those coins are still spendable, and maybe to consolidate them as needed. Maybe you don't actually have to spend the coins, but just make sure you can restore from backup any cold storage you have, so you know you can spend them in the future. Of course, this is done either offline or with proper security practices.

I'm of the assumption that these coins are either in cold storage or protected behind a hardware wallet (which is = cold storage too.) If not, and you're still using hot wallets, then it would be wise to move any coins you don't need to spend immediately to cold storage.

Finally, if you suspect that someone may have access to your coins or your wallet could be compromised, you create a new wallet and move your coins there, then you know the new address is secure.

I do have some coins that have not moved in 8 years. They were paper wallets to begin with, I don't think they are moving on their own any time soon.

[BlackHatCoiner]

No one is stealing the coins, just marking them as unspendable after they have not been spent 10 years from now (so, some really old coins not moved in 20 years). It was just a suggestion and I have no problem with no one doing anything about them as the coins are unlikely to be spent at all if no one has moved them in the past 10, 11, or 12 years.

Actually, quite the opposite. Everyone's stealing the coins as they become slightly richer due to this feature. They become richer due to the user's inability to spend their funds.

The longest time frame I've seen for fiat banks is 15 years of inactivity, they then mark those as dormant and can "escheat" the money to the state or central bank or whatever. There are procedures for claiming that money.

I think that you should think of Bitcoin as cash; it has been told hundreds of times. What would happen if you left your cash or gold buried in the ground for over two decades? Would you be unable of spending them?

I think that you're trying to find a solution to a problem (Satoshi's rewarded addresses whose public key is exposed) and you introduce others by doing so. Of course, consensus is required to enable this. What I'm telling you is that the users will never come in an agreement for it due to its utopianism.

[n0nce]

I think that you're trying to find a solution to a problem (Satoshi's rewarded addresses whose public key is exposed) and you introduce others by doing so. Of course, consensus is required to enable this. What I'm telling you is that the users will never come in an agreement for it due to its utopianism.

I think stealing non-moved coins is really dumb and not needed, and nobody will agree to this idea.

However, I think it might be interesting to explore the idea of 'empty blocks' in the sense that if all utxos are spent, you don't have to keep them in the Blockchain.

But in general, all this topic is really 'trying to find an idea to a nonexistent problem'. Recently, someone brought to my attention how many people now have a 256GB phone. While the Blockchain is sitting at a bit over 300 gigs. The 'flippening' () is probably happening very soon where it will be normal to have enough space on your mobile phone to store the entire Bitcoin blockchain if you wanted. At that point, it will be an absolute no brainer to just run a full node on your multi-TB all-SSD PC or laptop at home.

As long as the Blockchain grows slower than storage for a given price (which it is) we don't have an issue to try to solve here.

Edit: I just realized this topic is 6 years old. I respect OP for thinking about blockchain size issues and potential solutions in a time where it wasn't yet clear that fast storage will be so cheap so soon. Prices fell from ~35ct/GB to ~8ct/GB. To get a 1TB SSD in 2015 cost ~350 bucks vs. 80 bucks now.

[BlackHatCoiner]

However, I think it might be interesting to explore the idea of 'empty blocks' in the sense that if all utxos are spent, you don't have to keep them in the Blockchain.

I've probably misunderstood what you said, but:  If you don't keep the spent transaction outputs, but rather dump them later instead, how will you maintain the chain? The PoW was done with these included.

[n0nce]

However, I think it might be interesting to explore the idea of 'empty blocks' in the sense that if all utxos are spent, you don't have to keep them in the Blockchain.

I've probably misunderstood what you said, but:  If you don't keep the spent transaction outputs, but rather dump them later instead, how will you maintain the chain? The PoW was done with these included.

No you're right, I didn't think this through at all so far, I don't think OP's idea would work without the 'deleting old utxos' part, I was just thinking maybe it could be possible but it's indeed not going to happen..

[larry_vw_1955]

I don't see why we should care at all what "Satoshi's Vision" was.

How can you say something like that? Of course we should care what his vision was. Now about that little quotations you provided. All I can about that is "my bad". 

[pooya87]

Not an altcoin.

It would be an altcoin.

There are some early addresses

They are using P2PK scripts where the output contains the public key instead of the hash of it and there is no "address" defined for these scripts, they are just outputs without a corresponding human readable string (aka an address).

so those coins can be stolen if enough computing power is put to them.

If by enough you mean a million+ years worth of computing power, then you are right.
Also your argument do not justify your idea simply because if ECC could be broken and bitcoin were still using it, then it would become obsolete as a whole.

[larry_vw_1955]

10 years might be too short.

Much too short.  There are a variety of very good reasons someone might not touch their bitcoins for more than a decade.

YOu are actually right. The correct timeframe could be more like 200 years.

I had been thinking about this issue and instead of creating a new thread, I decided to just add my proposal to the OP's since he and I have similar ideas. Hopefully satoshi if he is reading this would not only reward the OP but me as well.

Sweeping stale bitcoin utxos and putting them back into circulation

UTXOs older than a certain number of blocks are allowed to be mined by a miner and put into a block which will then delete the utxo and transfer a certain percentage of it's value to the miner that mined it. The other part will be distributed in a somewhat unpredictable/random fashion to some known active bitcoin addresses.

The UTXO set contains unspendable outputs. It also contains outputs that are theoretically spendable but can't be spent due to various reasons. Both of these problems could be resolved by adopting this practice of getting rid of stale utxos.

[Dabs]

Guys, I'm not talking about an altcoin, or if a fork is made and it turns out to be an altcoin that no one uses. We stick to bitcoin and if no one likes the idea, and no consensus is reached, then there are no changes. I don't agree with everything the OP said, except the part where unspent coins will remain unspendable.

Currently, they are unspent because they have not been spent, but can one day be spent. Whether ECC is broken or not, the concern is the public keys of those early addresses (P2PK) are known and exposed.

It also doubles as a Canary ... because then everyone will see that those coins get spent one day and we all suspect it's probably not Satoshi who moved them.

My idea was just building up on the OP, who said, if it's not been spent, let's make sure it never gets spent.

I have no issues leaving it the way it is, and this idea is not new, it has been brought up before by other people. We don't want reclaiming coins (and a lot do not want that), but I think unspent coins in P2PK addresses that have remained unspent for 20 years ought to become unspendable in the future.

By the way, does anyone have an idea how much BTC there are in P2PK addresses that have not moved since maybe 2011? (or when did we start not using P2PK addresses?). I read some estimates of about 2 million bitcoin in P2PK addresses that have not moved.

Relevant link: https://bitcoinist.com/bitcoin-worth-usd-40-billion-vulnerable-to-quantum-attacks/

[pooya87]

Whether ECC is broken or not, the concern is the public keys of those early addresses (P2PK) are known and exposed.
We don't want reclaiming coins (and a lot do not want that), but I think unspent coins in P2PK addresses that have remained unspent for 20 years ought to become unspendable in the future.

First of all it does matter if ECC is broken or not. Without ECC being broken it doesn't matter at all if the public keys of those outputs (or any other output such as the case with address-reuse) are known, public keys are meant to be public, that's the whole point of asymmetric cryptography.
So for it to be a concern, ECC or at least 256-bit curve has to be broken and considered weak.

Secondly there shouldn't be any kind of "coin age" involved. If ECC is broken and someone can compute private key from it (or break ECDSA, etc.) in reasonable time then there is nothing stopping them from investing more effort into it so that they can also reverse your transaction from an only once used P2PKH output while it sits in the mempool waiting to be confirmed (you have to reveal the public key then).
As I said before you can no longer say "bitcoin is safe" if ECC is broken. So it has to be replaced completely in the protocol (affecting all coins).

Think of it as what happened to SHA1. At some point it was considered weak, then there was a very long transitional period where all browsers started migrating to SHA2 certificates and then at a certain date they stopped accepting any SHA1 certificate altogether. Today if a website has a SHA1 certificate your browser will block it. Then after all that time, someone (Google) found a collision by spending a lot of computing power.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Think of it as what happened to SHA1. At some point it was considered weak, then there was a very long transitional period where all browsers started migrating to SHA2 certificates and then at a certain date they stopped accepting any SHA1 certificate altogether.

Yes, but I think the question is:  How can we migrate to a stronger algorithm by retaining the private keys of the current ECDSA? In your example, the browsers had to just start using a different hash algorithm, but they weren't concerned on “converting” the old hashes to new ones. In this case, someone who owns money on a P2PK address has to be able to spend them with the same ECDSA private key it was given to him, but switch to a stronger algorithm at the same time.

[pooya87]

Yes, but I think the question is:  How can we migrate to a stronger algorithm by retaining the private keys of the current ECDSA?

It depends on what is broken, and some other details which you'll need an expert.
- If it were the signature algorithm (ECDSA) then choosing a different signature algorithm could solve the issue while still using the same curve (hence the same key pairs). Basically we can only change how OP_Check(Multi)Sig(Verify) OP codes (4 OPs) work.
- If the vulnerability were with the secp256k1 curve, changing curve would be a solution but the same keys may not be on the new curve anymore. I also doubt this can happen on this curve alone and not all 256-bit curves (ie the next bullet point).
- If Elliptic Curve Cryptography itself were broken (eg. private to public key were reversible) it has to be completely replaced by another asymmetric cryptography algorithm which may or may not make the existing keys unusable.

[BlackHatCoiner]

It depends on what is broken, and some other details which you'll need an expert.

The whole point of Bitcoin works if the public key used in the scriptSig cannot be reversed. That's where we'll start. Vulnerabilities in secp256k1 haven't be found and probably will never be as the constants were picked in a predictable way which reduces the odds of having inserted a hidden backdoor into the curve.

This leaves us to acknowledge that your third bullet point could be the only realistic possibility sometime in the future. The question remains: What will happen in case the existing keys become unusable at some point in the future? Shouldn't we take some sort of precautions? The last thing we'd want is to force everyone hastily to change their keys.

[pooya87]

~ as the constants were picked in a predictable way

Were they? I don't think NIST has ever released how they chose any of the domain parameters of any of their curves. Their "r" (random) curves such as secp256r1 have a random seed but that doesn't apply to "k" (Koblitz) curves.

The last thing we'd want is to force everyone hastily to change their keys.

I can't predict the future but most probably there will be a long interval (like a year or two) for people to migrate.
BTW Tarproot (P2TR) uses the public key in pubkey scripts similar to (but more complicated than) P2PK.

[Shymaa-Arafat]

I had been thinking about this issue and instead of creating a new thread, I decided to just add my proposal to the OP's since he and I have similar ideas. Hopefully satoshi if he is reading this would not only reward the OP but me as well.

Sweeping stale bitcoin utxos and putting them back into circulation

UTXOs older than a certain number of blocks are allowed to be mined by a miner and put into a block which will then delete the utxo and transfer a certain percentage of it's value to the miner that mined it. The other part will be distributed in a somewhat unpredictable/random fashion to some known active bitcoin addresses.

The UTXO set contains unspendable outputs. It also contains outputs that are theoretically spendable but can't be spent due to various reasons. Both of these problems could be resolved by adopting this practice of getting rid of stale utxos

You are talking about stealing or destroying people's money here, what if they're just HODLing???
I definitely do not agree.
Also, if u force a referesh, u will be forcing them to reveal their identity which I think is against Bitcoin main feature of Anonymity

If u worry about UTXOS set size, u could modify the idea in the paper we were discussing here
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5357803.0

To make an age threshold which  after it UTXOS are kept in secondary storage, and can only be spent with an extra fee like min charge since they will require a disk access to verify.

The min charge fee could be announced before being applied. Although in fact the sudden movement of all old UTXOS could cause some mess in programs that handle the UTXOS Merkle based on the heuristic of old UTXOS r less likely to being spent than newer ones, and in the market metrics data scientist use to predict price & advice their customers so may affect the price not sure how

[BlackHatCoiner]

Were they?

That's what we've written in our wiki. It is also written in this pdf.

I can't predict the future but

You don't have to predict the future. I'm not asking you to tell me the exact steps we'll follow to secure the system after the specific public-key cryptographic algorithm we're using is broken. I'm just telling you that at some point in the future, whether we want it or not, we'll have to demand from “our” users to migrate.

Needless to mention the problems that're created once we touch people's money.

[n0nce]

whether we want it or not, we'll have to demand from “our” users to migrate.

I mean, it will be in 'their' interest, because else they'll lose all funds.
Contrary to random hacked / stolen / leaked Netflix accounts for example, there is a big financial incentive to crack public Bitcoin keys.

Also, if u force a referesh, u will be forcing them to reveal their identity which I think is against Bitcoin main feature of Anonymity

Why so? I myself one day decided to transfer funds from my legacy addresses to bech32 addresses and did it to save on transaction fees in the long run. The old addresses were not tied to my identity, the new ones aren't either. I don't see how anonymity was compromised in the process. This is how migration to new wallets with a new cryptographic scheme could work.

[pooya87]

That's what we've written in our wiki. It is also written in this pdf.

Someone more knowledgeable than I should comment on that.

You don't have to predict the future. I'm not asking you to tell me the exact steps we'll follow to secure the system after the specific public-key cryptographic algorithm we're using is broken.

Well the exact steps depends on what happens. For example SHA-0 was replaced by SHA-1 almost as fast as NIST published the standard for it because it had a weakness and it was found quickly. Same with SHA-1 but it took a long time (20 years) to break that one.
With the current ECDLP solutions it would take more than our lifetime to break anything but I can't predict what's going to change.

I'm just telling you that at some point in the future, whether we want it or not, we'll have to demand from “our” users to migrate.
Needless to mention the problems that're created once we touch people's money.

That's the nature of any hard fork and nothing can be done about it! And we aren't touching anyone's money, they would do it themselves.

[Shymaa-Arafat]

Helpful about hard forks/ soft forks & combined here
https://youtu.be/U2yAcsj7P_E
She discusses in min 1:9-15 I think how sometimes people using SPV loses money if wallets wasn't careful about the update (they just see block headers & the Merkle paths they care about)

& interesting in this one u'll see he says Schnorr was known to be better from the beginning, but had a 20yrs copyright that prevented it's use
https://youtu.be/0Q5IimX-AAc
.
Sorry, if this is considered out of scope of this topic.

[n0nce]

Also, if u force a referesh, u will be forcing them to reveal their identity which I think is against Bitcoin main feature of Anonymity

Why so? I myself one day decided to transfer funds from my legacy addresses to bech32 addresses and did it to save on transaction fees in the long run. The old addresses were not tied to my identity, the new ones aren't either. I don't see how anonymity was compromised in the process. This is how migration to new wallets with a new cryptographic scheme could work.

There's possibility the owner doesn't have privacy awareness. For example, the owner would simply download Electrum, then move all coins in single transaction. Electrum's server would know his IP/UTXO set and any blockchain analyzer will make conclusion that those old UTXO belong to same person.

I agree, but if the old wallet wasn't linked to their identity, the new one won't either. Sure, they'll be linked amongst them, but what's the issue?

That's what we've written in our wiki. It is also written in this pdf.

Someone more knowledgeable than I should comment on that.

Looking at wiki history, looks like @theymos is the one who add statement about it. Maybe he can give some information.

Also, unlike the popular NIST curves, secp256k1's constants were selected in a predictable way, which significantly reduces the possibility that the curve's creator inserted any sort of backdoor into the curve.

Interesting. I found this paper online that compares the koblitz and random versions: http://ijeecs.iaescore.com/index.php/IJEECS/article/view/15610
Apparently, secp256k1 is up to 30% faster than secp256r1 and slightly (but not significantly) less secure. In section 4, they also argue that secp256r1 has some weird constants of itself as well:

However, secp256r1 uses the very suspicious seed "c49d360886e704936a6 678e1139d26b7819f7e90" which is strangely similar to the backdoor in Dual_EC_DRBG [18].

[n0nce]

There's possibility the owner doesn't have privacy awareness. For example, the owner would simply download Electrum, then move all coins in single transaction. Electrum's server would know his IP/UTXO set and any blockchain analyzer will make conclusion that those old UTXO belong to same person.

I agree, but if the old wallet wasn't linked to their identity, the new one won't either. Sure, they'll be linked amongst them, but what's the issue?

But you're assuming all old UTXOs isn't linked to their identity. Their privacy is broken if they move all of their UTXOs in single transaction. Even if none of the UTXOs linked to their identity, it still has privacy concern. For example,
1. Blockchain analyzer will know certain someone have X Bitcoin since they move few UTXO in single transaction.
2. If the owner decide to spend his Bitcoin, the receiver might know how much Bitcoin he have.

Riiight, makes sense, thanks! Would there be a concern in sending all utxo's at once to chipmixer and receiving it on multiple addresses in the new wallet?

[larry_vw_1955]

You are talking about stealing or destroying people's money here, what if they're just HODLing???

If they "they" you mean a single person then don't worry. 200 years is plenty of time for them to make a transaction. if they haven't done it by then they aint gonna do it.

here's a question for you though. how do you stop someone from setting up automated transactions that would occur every 199 years? because we need to make sure that people are doing these transactions and not computer programs. that might be a big problem, no?

oh and i'm not hugely concerned about the utxo set size but then again, if you're talking about moving older utxos to a secondary storage and charge people fees to use them then i'm against that. but I'm not against the idea of chipping away at peoples stale utxos so that instead of taking the entire thing all at once, you just take parts of it so that over time it goes to zero. that way they get a advanced warning to do something or else.

[Shymaa-Arafat]

oh and i'm not hugely concerned about the utxo set size but then again, if you're talking about moving older utxos to a secondary storage and charge people fees to use them then i'm against that. but I'm not against the idea of chipping away at peoples stale utxos so that instead of taking the entire thing all at once, you just take parts of it so that over time it goes to zero. that way they get a advanced warning to do something or else.

I'm just suggesting the "or else" after the advanced warning to be more extra fee because it will be fetched from secondary storage, instead of being those UTXOS r  just trimmed with any coins in them simply vanished

[larry_vw_1955]

I'm just suggesting the "or else" after the advanced warning to be more extra fee because it will be fetched from secondary storage, instead of being those UTXOS r  just trimmed with any coins in them simply vanished

I'm not advocating they "vanish" just that they be redistributed to active bitcoin participants. That's all. If an address has no activity for a certain amount of time, it's pretty sure that it can't participate in bitcoin anymore. And that it won't be.

Now as far as secondary storage to me that seems like a very slippery slope. Where they can segregate utxos based on some type of metrics and charge them extra fees to use bitcoin. So what ends up happening is that bitcoin is not really fungible and certain kinds of utxos will be discriminated against. I wouldn't be interested in that at all.

But if someone is not going to use their bitoin for their entire lifetime and another lifetime after that then a case could be made that they dont need it.

[DaveF]

I'm not advocating they "vanish" just that they be redistributed to active bitcoin participants. That's all. If an address has no activity for a certain amount of time, it's pretty sure that it can't participate in bitcoin anymore. And that it won't be.

I have a gold coin from about 1800 to 1805. It's been passed around my family for about 200+ years.

It's worth whatever a few grams of gold are worth today+ a bit. Might be worth a bit more due to it's age but since it's in such poor shape that last time we tried to get a value placed on it, the general consensus was yeah more then gold value less then 3x gold value so still well under $500

If I put BTC0.001 on an opendime or in any other physical collectable, why the hell do you think it's value should be taken from whoever it is passed down to through the years and given to others?

-Dave

[Dabs]

If I put BTC0.001 on an opendime or in any other physical collectable, why the hell do you think it's value should be taken from whoever it is passed down to through the years and given to others?

Opendimes don't use P2PK addresses (or they are not even addresses, just public keys) so that shouldn't be an issue. But Opendimes don't use Segwit either, I'd prefer it if they did or got updated.

"Redistribution" is out of the question. I think the intent of the OP and many others is to prevent P2PK coins from being spent at all.

ECC may be broken, but there are several phases of "brokeness" and I think if it's only broken where the hats still need several hours or days of computing to get one private key out of a single public key, (or several months), it's not that broken enough and most old coins ... we'll see it happening and can probably act on it, if needed.

But if ECC takes less than 10 minutes to crack a private key, then it is truly broken, and we'll probably see a whole bunch of other internet services and websites (and other financial institutions connected to the internet) fall first. (unless the bad guys are smart and decide to do small targetted attacks ...)

[DaveF]

If I put BTC0.001 on an opendime or in any other physical collectable, why the hell do you think it's value should be taken from whoever it is passed down to through the years and given to others?

Opendimes don't use P2PK addresses (or they are not even addresses, just public keys) so that shouldn't be an issue. But Opendimes don't use Segwit either, I'd prefer it if they did or got updated.

"Redistribution" is out of the question. I think the intent of the OP and many others is to prevent P2PK coins from being spent at all.

ECC may be broken, but there are several phases of "brokeness" and I think if it's only broken where the hats still need several hours or days of computing to get one private key out of a single public key, (or several months), it's not that broken enough and most old coins ... we'll see it happening and can probably act on it, if needed.

But if ECC takes less than 10 minutes to crack a private key, then it is truly broken, and we'll probably see a whole bunch of other internet services and websites (and other financial institutions connected to the internet) fall first. (unless the bad guys are smart and decide to do small targetted attacks ...)

Perhaps not the best example on my part, but it still is the same in my mind.

If I take the gold coin or loaded opendime out of my pocket and leave it on a table where anyone can get to it and it gets stolen that's on me.

Since we do know that over time having the opendime in my pocket can lead to damage making it unusable and if I cary the gold coin in the same pocket with my keys the gold is slowling going to get worn off / scraped off and there will be less gold so the coin is worth less. That's on me too.

It's just my opinion but, why should this be any different?

-Dave

[larry_vw_1955]

I have a gold coin from about 1800 to 1805. It's been passed around my family for about 200+ years.

It's worth whatever a few grams of gold are worth today+ a bit. Might be worth a bit more due to it's age but since it's in such poor shape that last time we tried to get a value placed on it, the general consensus was yeah more then gold value less then 3x gold value so still well under $500

If I put BTC0.001 on an opendime or in any other physical collectable, why the hell do you think it's value should be taken from whoever it is passed down to through the years and given to others?

-Dave

I don't think I would take opendime or any physical collectible too seriously since that's not what bitcoin was designed for. Transactions need to occur on the blockchain to be recognized as valid by the network. We all know that. If someone wants to do transactins "offline" and not pay transaction fees and not have it recorded on the blockchain well I don't know what to tell you!

[larry_vw_1955]

It's just my opinion but, why should this be any different?

-Dave

You may not agree but it is different. Way different. Gold that you hold and pass down to generations doesn't impose any cost upon any type of infrastructure. And if it did, you would have to pay fees. Like for storing it or getting it appraised or recasting it into some other form. But if you just store it under your bed, you're not imposing any type of cost to anyone else.

On the other hand with bitcoin your utxos do cost the network storage costs. So that's the difference. They have to maintain your utxos in the utxo set until you decide to use them or someone decides to use them. So they have an ongoing cost for maintaining your bitcoin. You can't expect them to front that cost however minimal forever, right? No you can't That's why ever so often you need to do transactions and pay transaction fees.

[ranochigo]

On the other hand with bitcoin your utxos do cost the network storage costs. So that's the difference. They have to maintain your utxos in the utxo set until you decide to use them or someone decides to use them. So they have an ongoing cost for maintaining your bitcoin. You can't expect them to front that cost however minimal forever, right? No you can't That's why ever so often you need to do transactions and pay transaction fees.

Storage costs are quite minimal. None of the network nodes are ever compensated for storing the blockchain, we aren't a PoS coin.

UTXO is the factor that isn't really all that significant. The size fluctuates at about 4GB right now, and people are incentivized to try to have as little UTXO as possible because a bigger UTXO entails a greater transaction size to create and to spend. As opposed to the 4GB UTXO being an issue, I would argue that the nearly 400GB of block data would be a better point to argue from. Block data grows linearly while UTXO doesn't necessarily have the same growth.

[Syke]

You can't expect them to front that cost however minimal forever, right?

Damn right I do. It's none of anyone's business if my wallets are lost or it's just my choice to not touch them.

[larry_vw_1955]

Damn right I do. It's none of anyone's business if my wallets are lost or it's just my choice to not touch them.

The only problem with that unspendable utxos impose a burden on the bitcoin network (the rest of us). The only way to deal with that is by cleaning out the utxo set periodically.

I would argue that the nearly 400GB of block data would be a better point to argue from. Block data grows linearly while UTXO doesn't necessarily have the same growth.

yeah that really needs to be looked at because I have no interest in storing 400GB on a hard drive. Let alone ten times that.

UTXO is the factor that isn't really all that significant. The size fluctuates at about 4GB right now, and people are incentivized to try to have as little UTXO as possible because a bigger UTXO entails a greater transaction size to create and to spend.

Satoshi being the genius that he was I wonder why he didn't come up with a way that miners would auto-consolidate utxos from the utxo set as part of their normal mining process. That way, each address would only have a single utxo associated with it. Under normal circumstances.  Kind of like an account based system but not really.

[ranochigo]

The only problem with that unspendable utxos impose a burden on the bitcoin network (the rest of us). The only way to deal with that is by cleaning out the utxo set periodically.

It doesn't... Relative to the rest of the spam that the network has to deal with. UTXOs are always getting added and deleted so the growth shouldn't be that significant. If your logic is that each UTXO imposes a burden on the network, then each transaction imposes a much higher burden than that, for which there is zero compensation to the nodes. How do we go about solving that?

Satoshi being the genius that he was I wonder why he didn't come up with a way that miners would auto-consolidate utxos from the utxo set as part of their normal mining process. That way, each address would only have a single utxo associated with it. Under normal circumstances.  Kind of like an account based system but not really.

Either you go with an account based system or you go without, there is no inbetween.

Ideally, each address should only have 1 UTXO, that is the intention of Satoshi, for privacy reasons. Wallets are always encouraging this behavior to their user to discourage address reuse, by the use of change address and a new address every transaction. No one really thought that UTXO set is really significant in size... Full (and unpruned nodes) aren't for everyone, so I don't think everyone have to run a full node, if they don't want to.

[ABCbits]

Damn right I do. It's none of anyone's business if my wallets are lost or it's just my choice to not touch them.

The only problem with that unspendable utxos impose a burden on the bitcoin network (the rest of us). The only way to deal with that is by cleaning out the utxo set periodically.

It's not serious problem, UTXO grow rapidly in last few years, but AFAIK it doesn't have big impact on cost of running full node. Raspberry Pi still can run full node at ease.

I would argue that the nearly 400GB of block data would be a better point to argue from. Block data grows linearly while UTXO doesn't necessarily have the same growth.

yeah that really needs to be looked at because I have no interest in storing 400GB on a hard drive. Let alone ten times that.

Then you should use pruned mode on Bitcoin Core or just don't run full node.

[Syke]

The only problem with that unspendable utxos impose a burden on the bitcoin network (the rest of us). The only way to deal with that is by cleaning out the utxo set periodically.

Will you listen to Satoshi?

You should never delete a wallet.

Wallets/UTXOs *never* expire.

[DaveF]

It's just my opinion but, why should this be any different?

-Dave

You may not agree but it is different. Way different. Gold that you hold and pass down to generations doesn't impose any cost upon any type of infrastructure. And if it did, you would have to pay fees. Like for storing it or getting it appraised or recasting it into some other form. But if you just store it under your bed, you're not imposing any type of cost to anyone else.

On the other hand with bitcoin your utxos do cost the network storage costs. So that's the difference. They have to maintain your utxos in the utxo set until you decide to use them or someone decides to use them. So they have an ongoing cost for maintaining your bitcoin. You can't expect them to front that cost however minimal forever, right? No you can't That's why ever so often you need to do transactions and pay transaction fees.

Storage costs are always dropping.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/

Although that chart only goes to 2017 and I do know that with the current supply chain / semiconductor issues at the moment the price drops have shrunk the cost of storage in terms of running a node have really not changed by any large amount.

You don't need the newest & fastest PC to run a node. There seems to be a 'fixed bottom cost' of a running & working old used PC at around $50. And those are fine for running a node.
And as others have pointed out the UTXO storage vs the rest of the blockchain is not that large.

-Dave

[Shymaa-Arafat]

If the principal of dropping UTXOS is there & allowed, why don't u drop holding 1 Satoshi or less than dust limit
& They're probably old anyway

[Dabs]

Satoshi being the genius that he was I wonder why he didn't come up with a way that miners would auto-consolidate utxos from the utxo set as part of their normal mining process. That way, each address would only have a single utxo associated with it. Under normal circumstances.  Kind of like an account based system but not really.

He didn't have to. As indicated, hard drive space is always going up too. Satoshi said something to that effect, and also something about all block headers or transactions fitting in a small space.


As for Opendimes, I like the concept, it's essentially a cold wallet or one of those physical coins with private keys / more advanced paper wallet. Perhaps for trading purposes, something like Opendimes would do when you have 0.01 BTC in several and you hand it over to someone else when buying stuff.

If I ever got one of those, I would of course sweep them immediately to my own form of cold storage.

Again, Opendimes do not use P2PK. Not many wallets today use P2PK. If you have an old address, it's probably not P2PK, and those will always be spendable in the future if you still have the private keys.

It's the P2PK public keys that we're talking about. Not addresses beginning with 1 or 3 or bc1.

I have no issues if there is no consensus ever about these public keys and nothing is done about them. They are likely to remain unspent in the next several decades and no one today uses these types of keys. With version 22 of the Core wallet released, we should also start seeing new Taproot addresses soon, maybe.

[vapourminer]

Damn right I do. It's none of anyone's business if my wallets are lost or it's just my choice to not touch them.

The only problem with that unspendable utxos impose a burden on the bitcoin network (the rest of us). The only way to deal with that is by cleaning out the utxo set periodically.

I would argue that the nearly 400GB of block data would be a better point to argue from. Block data grows linearly while UTXO doesn't necessarily have the same growth.

yeah that really needs to be looked at because BTC. Let alone ten times that.

400 gb? geeze you should see my steam folders size.

i run a full unpruned node, gave it a 500 gb ssd, which will last until a 1tb ssd is the price of dirt..

anyway i like my old UTXOs thank you. and the network will still have them ready for me years from now. thats how bitcoin works.

[DaveF]

...
Again, Opendimes do not use P2PK. Not many wallets today use P2PK. If you have an old address, it's probably not P2PK, and those will always be spendable in the future if you still have the private keys.

It's the P2PK public keys that we're talking about. Not addresses beginning with 1 or 3 or bc1.
..

Agree with you 100%

Does not matter if it's P2PK public keys or a traditional (1... or 3... or bc1...) address as you said the coins should never be touched.
larry_vw_1955 wants to change that.
What happens in the future when someone else decides that the bc1... is bad and should be invalidated or some other crap.

-Dave

[larry_vw_1955]

It doesn't... Relative to the rest of the spam that the network has to deal with. UTXOs are always getting added and deleted so the growth shouldn't be that significant. If your logic is that each UTXO imposes a burden on the network, then each transaction imposes a much higher burden than that, for which there is zero compensation to the nodes. How do we go about solving that?

I get the feeling that your question is somewhat rhetorical in nature and that you don't really believe that anything needs to be "solved". But there are possible solutions to the blockchain size issue. I even thought of one myself recently. Actually 2 of them. I'll share one of them here. the other deserves a bigger platform like its own thread maybe!

Just take a snapshot of the utxo set after mining block #XYZ. The utxo set at that time will becomes the new genesis block. And that is all that would need to be saved. Rince and repeat every 10 years or so. Bitcoin purists and crypto historians can enjoy keeping the old blockchain and actually seeing how things got to the state they are in if they want to while the network goes on about its business in a more efficient manner.

Either you go with an account based system or you go without, there is no inbetween.

See my comment above.

[ranochigo]

I get the feeling that your question is somewhat rhetorical in nature and that you don't really believe that anything needs to be "solved". But there are possible solutions to the blockchain size issue. I even thought of one myself recently. Actually 2 of them. I'll share one of them here. the other deserves a bigger platform like its own thread maybe!

Just take a snapshot of the utxo set after mining block #XYZ. The utxo set at that time will becomes the new genesis block. And that is all that would need to be saved. Rince and repeat every 10 years or so. Bitcoin purists and crypto historians can enjoy keeping the old blockchain and actually seeing how things got to the state they are in if they want to while the network goes on about its business in a more efficient manner.

It wasn't really a rhetorical question. Given how the argument is centered about UTXO size, I was wondering if you were concerned about blockchain size as well.

I think this "solution" has been discussed quite a few times, and I don't really find it an issue anymore. We've had pruning for quite a few years now, and it describes exactly what you're talking about. Where users choose to save how much block data they need while discarding the rest and retaining the UTXO. If you prefer to trust someone to tell you what is right at a certain point of time, instead of validating yourself, then it would be better to just use an SPV wallet. I don't expect the majority to require a full node and in the near future, SPV nodes should fulfill their needs instead of wasting their resources to run a full node if they are unable to.

Anyhow, throughout my time here, I've seen this solution being proposed more than a dozen times. The reason why the UTXO commitment or blockchain truncating isn't viable right now is that the user has to trust that the commitment is accurate and isn't intentionally manipulated. I would think that this only serves to solve the problem with regards to the storage space, for which pruning is sufficient.

[larry_vw_1955]

As for Opendimes, I like the concept, it's essentially a cold wallet or one of those physical coins with private keys / more advanced paper wallet. Perhaps for trading purposes, something like Opendimes would do when you have 0.01 BTC in several and you hand it over to someone else when buying stuff.

Maybe 0.001 btc but 0.01 BTC is like $5000. I don't think I woudl trust an opendime to that much money. But I guess it's all relative. If someone can afford to lose 5 grand and it wouldn't hurt them then maybe they would be fine with having an opendime lying around with that much on it. It really is like a ticking time bomb until you take off the funds.

El Salvador should be coming out with their own bitcoin bearer bond bank notes anytime soon though...hopefully they won't go off the "bitcoin standard" though. Because paper money has a way of becoming worthless. there absolutely has to be bitcoins in the bank vault backing up that printed paper I tell ya.

Err I think my math was wrong. 0.01 BTC is $500 but still. For some people that's alot of cash. But maybe worth the risk of losing it just for the coolness factor.

[larry_vw_1955]

Storage costs are always dropping.

yeah just like cpu speeds are always getting faster. not.

that's why in that article you linked to, we see them stating "As you’ll see, the hard drive pricing curve has flattened out."  there's a reason the pricing curves flatten out and it's due to business economics.

[tromp]

Maybe 0.001 btc but 0.01 BTC is like $5000.

More like $500.

[larry_vw_1955]

It wasn't really a rhetorical question. Given how the argument is centered about UTXO size, I was wondering if you were concerned about blockchain size as well.

Yeah of course, I'm concerned about it. Unless you download the entire blockchain then you can't really interact fully with it.

I think this "solution" has been discussed quite a few times, and I don't really find it an issue anymore. We've had pruning for quite a few years now, and it describes exactly what you're talking about. Where users choose to save how much block data they need while discarding the rest and retaining the UTXO.

they still have to download the entire blockchain though. and keep it updated. that's kind of a hassle.

Anyhow, throughout my time here, I've seen this solution being proposed more than a dozen times. The reason why the UTXO commitment or blockchain truncating isn't viable right now is that the user has to trust that the commitment is accurate and isn't intentionally manipulated. I would think that this only serves to solve the problem with regards to the storage space, for which pruning is sufficient.

Once the network come to a consensus about the new genesys block it wuold be just like satoshi's genesys block. everyone could trust it just as much. there's always a risk of the things you mentioned even without doing this. As time goes on, less and less people/organizations are going to maintain a copy of the entire blockchain. Maybe oneday no one will have an entire copy. That would be a pretty bad situation.

Will you listen to Satoshi?

Quote from: satoshi
You should never delete a wallet.

Wallets/UTXOs *never* expire.

I never heard that one before but if Satoshi said that then I guess I have to rethink my idea about making utxos expire. I can't be contradicting the man.

[ranochigo]

they still have to download the entire blockchain though. and keep it updated. that's kind of a hassle.

Once the network come to a consensus about the new genesys block it wuold be just like satoshi's genesys block. everyone could trust it just as much. there's always a risk of the things you mentioned even without doing this. As time goes on, less and less people/organizations are going to maintain a copy of the entire blockchain. Maybe oneday no one will have an entire copy. That would be a pretty bad situation.

Why do you need a full node? For the majority, any SPV clients would suffice and it wouldn't incur that much resource usage as well.

The problem with a snapshot is that someone has to define the interval or the block height for which it occurs, and the consensus will never be reached on that. The decision will ultimately fall with a certain group of people instead of the community as a whole. Satoshi's genesis block was universally defined as the block zero, for which the first Bitcoin client was shipped with, there was no consensus about that. I find having to trust someone on the state of the blockchain, instead of verifying it as a whole would just be akin to me using a SPV client.

The issue that you've stated so far is not a pressing issue at all. The HDD argument is not very valid; areal density is improving year on year and the reason the price has decreased is due to the cost of production and the increase in HDD density.

I never heard that one before but if Satoshi said that then I guess I have to rethink my idea about making utxos expire. I can't be contradicting the man.

Not saying that we shouldn't follow that but it really doesn't make sense. Bitcoin belongs to the community, not to Satoshi. It really doesn't matter what he says, just look at the issue on its practicality as well as the ethics of it. On this issue, the problem lies with the ethics.

[ABCbits]

It doesn't... Relative to the rest of the spam that the network has to deal with. UTXOs are always getting added and deleted so the growth shouldn't be that significant. If your logic is that each UTXO imposes a burden on the network, then each transaction imposes a much higher burden than that, for which there is zero compensation to the nodes. How do we go about solving that?

I get the feeling that your question is somewhat rhetorical in nature and that you don't really believe that anything needs to be "solved". But there are possible solutions to the blockchain size issue. I even thought of one myself recently. Actually 2 of them. I'll share one of them here. the other deserves a bigger platform like its own thread maybe!

Just take a snapshot of the utxo set after mining block #XYZ. The utxo set at that time will becomes the new genesis block. And that is all that would need to be saved. Rince and repeat every 10 years or so. Bitcoin purists and crypto historians can enjoy keeping the old blockchain and actually seeing how things got to the state they are in if they want to while the network goes on about its business in a more efficient manner.

Similar technology already exist and it's called "UTXO commitment". The difference are,
1. It doesn't delete all older block before snapshot. So it;s possible to verify whether the snapshot itself is valid.
2. The goal is to speed up node sync process. Node have option to blindly trust it or verify it later after downloading whole block.

Or just use SPV wallet if you can't or don't want afford to run full node.

[Dabs]

As time goes on, less and less people/organizations are going to maintain a copy of the entire blockchain. Maybe oneday no one will have an entire copy. That would be a pretty bad situation.

Unlikely. There are lots of companies that do not delete tons of data. All the social media networks. ...

There are plenty of otherwise "normal" people with large hard drives that keep data and backups of those data.

And, there are the ever present pirates who hoard abandoned software and games and movies with terabytes of storage.

Someone will always be keeping the entire copy. Right now, that's at least 10k full nodes, and another 20k lightning nodes (I think they need to be full nodes as well).

I do like the idea of committed transactions and summary "re-genesis" blocks, but I don't think that will be a problem for several decades, and by then maybe storage will have advanced and become cheaper. Mobile phones will be 10 TB in 10 years, and your average low budget laptop would be running on 16 to 20 TB SSDs.

For anyone who stores more than a few thousand dollars worth of bitcoin, it would not be a bad idea to run a full node that costs a hundred bucks.

[n0nce]

yeah that really needs to be looked at because I have no interest in storing 400GB on a hard drive. Let alone ten times that.

Not sure where you get the '10 times that' from, but it will take a looong time for the blockchain to get that large By then, it might will be cheaper to get a 4TB SSD than getting a 400GB SSD now.
I agree with Dabs here.

Mobile phones will be 10 TB in 10 years, and your average low budget laptop would be running on 16 to 20 TB SSDs.
For anyone who stores more than a few thousand dollars worth of bitcoin, it would not be a bad idea to run a full node that costs a hundred bucks.

In general, you're trying to argument for huge, substantial changes to Bitcoin just to save 4GB of disk space, which cost around 28 cents at a price of currently ~8 cents per GB. Nobody would change Bitcoin in such a way to save 28 cents per node.

This makes the whole topic pointless until there is a solution for the blockchain size 'problem'. Because nobody cares about 4GB more or less if they have to store 400GB of blockchain. On that note, even this is not an issue, as has been explained. I can get a 2TB (!!) SSD now for 140 bucks, that's barely the cost of many hardware wallets, plug it into an old PC or laptop and have a fully verified node with enough storage to run for like 20 years or more.

Maybe 0.001 btc but 0.01 BTC is like $5000 $500. I don't think I woudl trust an opendime to that much money. But I guess it's all relative. If someone can afford to lose 5 grand hundred and it wouldn't hurt them then maybe they would be fine with having an opendime lying around with that much on it. It really is like a ticking time bomb until you take off the funds.

I don't understand. Why should an opendime be less secure than another kind of paper / offline wallet?

[DaveF]

...
they still have to download the entire blockchain though. and keep it updated. that's kind of a hassle...

Why is it a hassle?
No matter what the blockchain looks like it's the same process, start node an wait till it's done.
Then keep it running to get all the new blocks as they are mined.

If you prune off a bunch of the blockchain, let me check the process....yep...start a node, wait till it's done and then keep it running.

A 1TB drive is under $40 here in the US new.
A 4th gen i5 PC with 8GB ram and a 1TB drive is under $150 delivered to your door.

Blockchain size is only an issue for people who want to make it an issue.

-Dave
Edit to add that as of now there is a sale going on at newegg.com a 16TB drive for $325, so you can just get one of those and not worry about it ever again....

[Dabs]

I don't understand. Why should an opendime be less secure than another kind of paper / offline wallet?

Opendimes can't survive if they are crushed, melted from high temperatures, or exposed to water for long periods of time. Your typical steel backup will stick around ... but it's a different use case.

[larry_vw_1955]

I don't understand. Why should an opendime be less secure than another kind of paper / offline wallet?

Because you can't make a backup of them.

[larry_vw_1955]

Similar technology already exist and it's called "UTXO commitment". The difference are,
1. It doesn't delete all older block before snapshot. So it;s possible to verify whether the snapshot itself is valid.
2. The goal is to speed up node sync process. Node have option to blindly trust it or verify it later after downloading whole block.

If it's go great then how come no one ever introduced it into bitcoin? There has to be some downsides as well, right? Exactly how does this utxo commitment thing work? We should go into some details so we can see if it really is any good or not. The thing we dont want to do in bitcoin is add alot of complexity and overhead in terms of processing and storage. But other than that, I'm all ears.

Especially if it would finally allow me to execute "sendrawtransaction" out of btc core without having to download an entire blockchain.

[ABCbits]

Similar technology already exist and it's called "UTXO commitment". The difference are,
1. It doesn't delete all older block before snapshot. So it;s possible to verify whether the snapshot itself is valid.
2. The goal is to speed up node sync process. Node have option to blindly trust it or verify it later after downloading whole block.

If it's go great then how come no one ever introduced it into bitcoin?

There are discussion about it into Bitcoin, but the community generally not interested or don't like because some trust is required.

There has to be some downsides as well, right? Exactly how does this utxo commitment thing work? We should go into some details so we can see if it really is any good or not. The thing we dont want to do in bitcoin is add alot of complexity and overhead in terms of processing and storage. But other than that, I'm all ears.

Obviously there are downside. I don't remember if there are any standard for UTXO commitment, but here are few past discussion about UTXO commitment or other similar idea,
1. Idea:Add the UTXO set to blocks
2. Proposal: including (UTXO) state hash in blocks (to eliminate IBD for new nodes)

Especially if it would finally allow me to execute "sendrawtransaction" out of btc core without having to download an entire blockchain.

You could always use Electrum or block explorer though.

[larry_vw_1955]

There are discussion about it into Bitcoin, but the community generally not interested or don't like because some trust is required.

Yeah there seemed to be alot of pushback from some members about this scheme although not everyone was against the idea.

Obviously there are downside. I don't remember if there are any standard for UTXO commitment, but here are few past discussion about UTXO commitment or other similar idea,

Yeah what stand out to me is this utxo commitment scheme seems overly complicated. Maybe more complicated than anything else in bitcoin. When you have to make new things that are more complicated than the old things just to gain some type of convenience, then that's like letting the tail wag the dog.

You could always use Electrum or block explorer though.

Well me personally I can't use electrum. It stopped working on my computer. All versions of it, not just the btc version but the ltc version and others. They don't care about that though. Used to work but then it stopped working. All you can do with a block explorer is push signed transactions (I think!). That's not what I'm looking for.

[larry_vw_1955]

I agree it's complicated, but what makes you think it seems overly complicated?

just cut the blockchain at a specific block height. have a new genisys block. jettison the blocks before that. problem solved. if u can have a geneisis block in 2008 or whenever satoshi made it, you can surely do that today. you could make the new geneisis block say something like "biden presidency is in shambles, afghanistan situation makes him look very bad." that way people would know that your genisys block occured at some time after august 2021.

people want to argue that you can't trust the new genisys block. bullcrap. you cuold. if enough big websites published the genisys block then people could come to a consensus pretty fast. i'm sure bitcoin.com and coinbase would oblige. (also I heard twitter is useful for publishing new genisys blocks). and twitter has "verified" accounts so we could be sure!

but seriously, bitcoin was never designed to be able to verify the utxo set without having the entire blockchain so trying to put that feature into place now results in something that probably shouldn't even be tried to be done. a redesign of bitcoin might be more appropriate. from the ground up. i mean why not just stick the entire darn utxo set into a block once a month. that seems way simpler. 

If all version of Electrum (including forked for altcoin) doesn't work, it's more likely something wrong with your OS.

Doubtful. I can install pretty much any other software and run it with no problem.

Than what you're looking for? Something like this (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5341539.msg57186698#msg57186698)?

No not really. that's just the same thing as going to a block explorer and pasting in the signed transaction. It would be nice if bitcoin core could just let me do a sendrawtransaction without having to dowload the entire damn blockchain! I know it's possible but they dont' want to let people do that.

[ABCbits]

people want to argue that you can't trust the new genisys block. bullcrap. you cuold. if enough big websites published the genisys block then people could come to a consensus pretty fast. i'm sure bitcoin.com and coinbase would oblige. (also I heard twitter is useful for publishing new genisys blocks). and twitter has "verified" accounts so we could be sure!

Rather than trust few for-profit company, why don't you just don't remove older block and replace "new" genesis block with snapshot block? In this scenario, new node could either
1. Trust the snapshot block, which means only sync starting from snapshot block.
2. Sync starting from snapshot block, then download & verify all older blocks.
3. Download and verify whole block sequentially (just like how Bitcoin Core currently works).

but seriously, bitcoin was never designed to be able to verify the utxo set without having the entire blockchain so trying to put that feature into place now results in something that probably shouldn't even be tried to be done. a redesign of bitcoin might be more appropriate. from the ground up.

That would require hard-fork on Bitcoin protocol & major changes on Bitcoin software.

i mean why not just stick the entire darn utxo set into a block once a month. that seems way simpler.

Simpler, but whole UTXO set is very big & quickly bloat blockchain. On Bitcoin Core, chainstate folder (which store UTXO) is around 4GB. Assuming each block has 2.5MB size, in 1 month (30 days), blockchain size would increased by ~10.5GB. If you also store whole UTXO set on blockchain every month, blockchain size would increased by ~14.5GB.

[vjudeu]

Snapshot blocks are possible without any forks, just nobody did it (yet). As long as new nodes are backward-compatible, there is no problem with that. I can imagine for example two week snapshots, done once per difficulty change. Then, your new client can download the latest UTXO set and start backward verification, processing 2016 blocks at a time in compressed form. Later, if snapshot from 2016 blocks is not enough, it could be replaced by 210,000 blocks snapshot, that would be 104+1/6 two-week blocks.

There is no need for a second Genesis Block. One is needed to set some starting point and prevent overwriting the whole chain in early days, when messing with timestamps by mining for example blocks from 1970 could be possible. But if you want to create some universal solution for a foreseeable future, then some rule of creating that kind of blocks regularly is needed, for example every 2016 blocks, every 210,000 blocks, and so on.

Edit: Also, we have some checkpoints, so overwriting them is impossible:

Code:

checkpointData = {
	{
		{ 11111, uint256S("0x0000000069e244f73d78e8fd29ba2fd2ed618bd6fa2ee92559f542fdb26e7c1d")},
		{ 33333, uint256S("0x000000002dd5588a74784eaa7ab0507a18ad16a236e7b1ce69f00d7ddfb5d0a6")},
		{ 74000, uint256S("0x0000000000573993a3c9e41ce34471c079dcf5f52a0e824a81e7f953b8661a20")},
		{105000, uint256S("0x00000000000291ce28027faea320c8d2b054b2e0fe44a773f3eefb151d6bdc97")},
		{134444, uint256S("0x00000000000005b12ffd4cd315cd34ffd4a594f430ac814c91184a0d42d2b0fe")},
		{168000, uint256S("0x000000000000099e61ea72015e79632f216fe6cb33d7899acb35b75c8303b763")},
		{193000, uint256S("0x000000000000059f452a5f7340de6682a977387c17010ff6e6c3bd83ca8b1317")},
		{210000, uint256S("0x000000000000048b95347e83192f69cf0366076336c639f9b7228e9ba171342e")},
		{216116, uint256S("0x00000000000001b4f4b433e81ee46494af945cf96014816a4e2370f11b23df4e")},
		{225430, uint256S("0x00000000000001c108384350f74090433e7fcf79a606b8e797f065b130575932")},
		{250000, uint256S("0x000000000000003887df1f29024b06fc2200b55f8af8f35453d7be294df2d214")},
		{279000, uint256S("0x0000000000000001ae8c72a0b0c301f67e3afca10e819efa9041e458e9bd7e40")},
		{295000, uint256S("0x00000000000000004d9b4ef50f0f9d686fd69db2e03af35a100370c64632a983")},
	}
};

That means the first 295,000 blocks are impossible to overwrite, even if you have enormously huge computing power and somehow create not just 51% attack, but 99,99% attack.

[Shymaa-Arafat]

Snapshot blocks are possible without any forks, just nobody did it (yet). As long as new nodes are backward-compatible, there is no problem with that. I can imagine for example two week snapshots, done once per difficulty change. Then, your new client can download the latest UTXO set and start backward verification, processing 2016 blocks at a time in compressed form. Later, if snapshot from 2016 blocks is not enough, it could be replaced by 210,000 blocks snapshot, that would be 104+1/6 two-week blocks.

Is this project "assume UTXOS" similar to what you are suggesting???

[vjudeu]

Is this project "assume UTXOS" similar to what you are suggesting???

It is somehow similar, but I assume full backward-compatibility. So, creating some UTXO set for blocks from M to N is possible. Sharing that set with new nodes is possible, but old nodes will know nothing about it. New nodes could use things like that, because it would be better than putting trust in SPV clients or Electrum servers. However, replacing existing system with all pruned nodes and removing old data entirely is impossible, because it is backward incompatible change, and then creating new full nodes would be impossible.

[larry_vw_1955]

Rather than trust few for-profit company, why don't you just don't remove older block and replace "new" genesis block with snapshot block?

Yeah exactly!

Simpler, but whole UTXO set is very big & quickly bloat blockchain. On Bitcoin Core, chainstate folder (which store UTXO) is around 4GB. Assuming each block has 2.5MB size, in 1 month (30 days), blockchain size would increased by ~10.5GB. If you also store whole UTXO set on blockchain every month, blockchain size would increased by ~14.5GB.

It's not a huge increase. Well it's a 50% increase but it's not out of the question. peoples' hard drive could handle it. If bitcoin sv can be pumping out gigabyte sized blocks every now and then, then bitcoin should be able to put the entire utxo set into a block every now and then. once you put the entire utxo set into a block that's a checkpoint and people don't need to download anything prior to that. thus solving the "downloading the blockchain" issue. Some nodes might keep 2 checkpoints, some might keep 10. Some might only keep one. No problem!

[ranochigo]

Snapshot blocks are possible without any forks, just nobody did it (yet). As long as new nodes are backward-compatible, there is no problem with that. I can imagine for example two week snapshots, done once per difficulty change. Then, your new client can download the latest UTXO set and start backward verification, processing 2016 blocks at a time in compressed form. Later, if snapshot from 2016 blocks is not enough, it could be replaced by 210,000 blocks snapshot, that would be 104+1/6 two-week blocks.

There is no need for a second Genesis Block. One is needed to set some starting point and prevent overwriting the whole chain in early days, when messing with timestamps by mining for example blocks from 1970 could be possible. But if you want to create some universal solution for a foreseeable future, then some rule of creating that kind of blocks regularly is needed, for example every 2016 blocks, every 210,000 blocks, and so on.

Backwards validation is not efficient, because you need the state of the blockchain and build it as you go. Your UTXO set should be defined within the client, instead of it being downloaded from other sources because that would result in certain security issues.

The checkpoints are actually being deprecated in Core and it doesn't have a lot of use right now given that we're using assumevalid. You can also disable both assumevalid and checkpoint if you want, so it is a Bitcoin Core specific implementation.

It's not a huge increase. Well it's a 50% increase but it's not out of the question. peoples' hard drive could handle it. If bitcoin sv can be pumping out gigabyte sized blocks every now and then, then bitcoin should be able to put the entire utxo set into a block every now and then. once you put the entire utxo set into a block that's a checkpoint and people don't need to download anything prior to that. thus solving the "downloading the blockchain" issue. Some nodes might keep 2 checkpoints, some might keep 10. Some might only keep one. No problem!

We absolutely cannot handle blocks that big. You're going to have loads of nodes being bottlenecked and taking an hour to download and validate your data set, especially with those underpowered ones.

I'm going to have to ask again, if you think that is an issue, then wouldn't it be better for you to just run an SPV client? Not being able to validate everything is antithetical to what Bitcoin Core has been striving for. Not to argue with the practicality of it but given there is already a ready-made solution, why would we have to further complicate it? You're going to run into groups of people who don't want people to choose and define checkpoints for them.

[BlackHatCoiner]

It's not a huge increase. Well it's a 50% increase but it's not out of the question. peoples' hard drive could handle it.

Nope. I guess most us who run a full node (such as in a RPi), do it with a 1TB external drive. If we extended the chain with 10.5GB every month, we'd sooner or later need more storage. So the ability for me to run my own node becomes more expensive.

If bitcoin sv can be pumping out gigabyte sized blocks every now and then

You know that there aren't many transactions broadcasted in BSV right? At least not if you compare it with Bitcoin.

once you put the entire utxo set into a block that's a checkpoint and people don't need to download anything prior to that

If you're trying to find a cheaper way for me to run a node, don't even think of it with checkpoints. If you just want to verify payments, SPV is the solution.

(Sorry, but I didn't read the entire discussion and I don't know exactly where you're referring to)

[Dabs]

If all version of Electrum (including forked for altcoin) doesn't work, it's more likely something wrong with your OS.

Doubtful. I can install pretty much any other software and run it with no problem.

Something is wrong with your machine or computer, something is wrong with either the hardware or software or OS. I can run Electrum fine and so do plenty of others, and I'm also running Electrum fine on several mobile devices and tablets.

Get your latest version of Electrum from the official website and verify it. If it still does not work, try it on a completely different computer or machine (or a VM).

[garlonicon]

Backwards validation is not efficient, because you need the state of the blockchain and build it as you go.

Backward validation is the only thing that makes sense in proposals like that, because if things have to be validated forward, then just downloading the whole blockchain is far better option. If things are validated forward, then starting point is in 2009 and nothing can be skipped. If nothing can be skipped, then creating UTXO set for every N blocks does not help with anything.

It could be faster in case of Schnorr signatures and joined transactions, so if we have Alice->Bob->Charlie and we can construct Alice->Charlie transaction with valid signature, then maybe we can do something like that for all blocks and check everything faster. But for current history without Schnorr signatures and with separated transactions there is not that much to be optimized.

[larry_vw_1955]

If all version of Electrum (including forked for altcoin) doesn't work, it's more likely something wrong with your OS.

Doubtful. I can install pretty much any other software and run it with no problem.

Something is wrong with your machine or computer, something is wrong with either the hardware or software or OS. I can run Electrum fine and so do plenty of others, and I'm also running Electrum fine on several mobile devices and tablets.

Get your latest version of Electrum from the official website and verify it. If it still does not work, try it on a completely different computer or machine (or a VM).

I remember it used to give me a popup window saying "Electrum has stopped working."

Problem event name: APPCRASH
Fault module name: ig4dev64.dll


but now it doesn't even do ANYTHING. When I try and run electrum, nothing happens at all! Except I do notice Electrum appearing in the running processes list for a couple seconds and then it disappears from the list, all without opening any windows. Electrum should at least allow me to run from a console or command line if it refuse to let me use its gui. Sorry this is off topic but think of it as a minor diversion for a heavy thread.

[kano]

It's not a huge increase. Well it's a 50% increase but it's not out of the question. peoples' hard drive could handle it.

Nope. I guess most us who run a full node (such as in a RPi), do it with a 1TB external drive. If we extended the chain with 10.5GB every month, we'd sooner or later need more storage. So the ability for me to run my own node becomes more expensive.
...

I'm not sure if you are hoping that Bitcoin will be limited by current technology or that somehow 'sooner or later' wont ever happen?
Even with 5GB every month, sooner or later you will need more storage.

[Pmalek]

I remember it used to give me a popup window saying "Electrum has stopped working."

Problem event name: APPCRASH
Fault module name: ig4dev64.dll

This is a problem on your end. You are probably using outdated drivers for your graphics cards or you are missing some essential Windows updates. Are you using Windows 7 btw? If so, Electrum requires Service Pack 1 and a few other KB installs.

According to search results, "ig4dev64.dll" and similar errors have to do with Intel Graphics cards. Again, check your Windows Updates and ensure everything is up-to-date, including driver updates for your GPU. 

[larry_vw_1955]

Nope. I guess most us who run a full node (such as in a RPi), do it with a 1TB external drive. If we extended the chain with 10.5GB every month, we'd sooner or later need more storage. So the ability for me to run my own node becomes more expensive.

How much does a 12 TB hard drive cost these days? $200? Maybe $150 on sale? Internet service can cost half that price every month.

You know that there aren't many transactions broadcasted in BSV right? At least not if you compare it with Bitcoin.

There's probably even more! They mined 2 1-gigabyte blocks in one day. How many transactions do you think were in those? Probably alot right?? Rest in peace the poor souls that have to store those damn huge blocks for eternity though. I mean they really do have to do that, there's no getting out of it.

[larry_vw_1955]

It's definitely huge increase and total UTXO usually grow over time.

yeah but does it really matter just as long as hard drive size outpaces blockchain growth size?

Show us the proof, last time i checked, BSV block size limit was few hundred MB while most blocks almost empty.

Then you must not be checking very often. Just in the last few hours, they had a couple blocks well over a half a gig.

842,094.069
701,736.836
636,876.82

The 636MB block had over 13,000 transactions in it. I think that pretty much proves it. Those are all in the right neighborhood. Whether you believe it or not.
As well it's incorrect to state that "most blocks almost empty" maybe you didn't realize but "most blocks" have over 1000 transactions in them, some blocks have more than 10,000 transactions in them. 

This is a problem on your end. You are probably using outdated drivers for your graphics cards or you are missing some essential Windows updates. Are you using Windows 7 btw? If so, Electrum requires Service Pack 1 and a few other KB installs.

Yeah I figured it was a problem on my end. thanks for the tips. I'll have to give it another go sometime. yeah it's windows 7.

[Dabs]

Yeah I figured it was a problem on my end. thanks for the tips. I'll have to give it another go sometime. yeah it's windows 7.

You probably already know this, but official support for Windows 7 ended last year, in January 14, 2020. No more updates (or at least not easily). Anything wrong with that machine, everyone else (but maybe not bitcoiners here) will tell you to update or something.

[BlackHatCoiner]

I'm not sure if you are hoping that Bitcoin will be limited by current technology or that somehow 'sooner or later' wont ever happen?
Even with 5GB every month, sooner or later you will need more storage.

Yes, sorry for this grammatical mistake. I meant that it'll be much sooner. (And will continuously rise much more than it would)

How much does a 12 TB hard drive cost these days? $200? Maybe $150 on sale? Internet service can cost half that price every month.

It goes beyond $300 for an external HDD with 12TB in my country. That's the cheapest I could find on amazon.

There's probably even more! They mined 2 1-gigabyte blocks in one day. How many transactions do you think were in those? Probably alot right?? Rest in peace the poor souls that have to store those damn huge blocks for eternity though. I mean they really do have to do that, there's no getting out of it.

You mean they mined with a block size limit 1GB? They can't have filled a block with 1GB transactions; I mean they must not have more than a thousand transactions every day.

[n0nce]

I don't understand. Why should an opendime be less secure than another kind of paper / offline wallet?

Opendimes can't survive if they are crushed, melted from high temperatures, or exposed to water for long periods of time. Your typical steel backup will stick around ... but it's a different use case.

Well, the example usage was to load it with 500 bucks and basically use it like a 500 dollar bill to pay for something. Such a bill is also destroyed by crushing, fire or water. I thought you doubted the cryptographic security of an opendime (anything else I would rather call 'safety' than 'security').

I don't understand. Why should an opendime be less secure than another kind of paper / offline wallet?

Because you can't make a backup of them.

Oh, because the private key is pre-set? That makes sense, yeah. But you can build something similar yourself with a backed up private key. Point being, cold storage should never lose its value just because it's not moved on-chain.

people want to argue that you can't trust the new genisys block. bullcrap. you cuold. if enough big websites published the genisys block then people could come to a consensus pretty fast. i'm sure bitcoin.com and coinbase would oblige. (also I heard twitter is useful for publishing new genisys blocks). and twitter has "verified" accounts so we could be sure!

Was this supposed to be a joke? Do you think Bitcoin works like this? Trusting a bunch of Twitter accounts and websites? WTF do you think this is all a joke? I don't know what to reply to this message, I have no words... We don't trust, we verify, damn, we're not Ethereum or some shit coin that follows a Twitter account or other kind of 'leader'...

Doubtful. I can install pretty much any other software and run it with no problem.

I'd still recommend to reinstall your OS especially if it's an old Windows install. But it's a common issue. Some corrupted residue files are flying around in some Electrum directory, that's why you have no issue with other software, but you do with Electrum.

yeah it's windows 7.

RIP

It's not a huge increase. Well it's a 50% increase but it's not out of the question. peoples' hard drive could handle it. If bitcoin sv can be pumping out gigabyte sized blocks every now and then [...]

We are comparing Bitcoin to BSV shitcoin now? Does it come anywhere close to Bitcoin in any aspect? I don't think so. What's the node count? Especially decentralizing a blockchain gets increasingly harder the more resources (read: storage) you require people to buy to run a node.

[larry_vw_1955]

Although "gigabyte sized blocks" isn't accurate term since it's less than 1GB, you proved your point. But obviously the cost of running node will be far more expensive (RAM/CPU on $10 VPS & Raspberry Pi won't be able to handle it), which means Bitcoin community likely will reject your idea.

Well not to bust anyones balls but in the last 4 days (Sept17 through Sept21), they have had 10 blocks over 1GB in size. I just didn't list them but they're there. so that means miners hard drives filled up by at least 10GB in the last 4 days (probably double that). you don't hear bsv miners complainiing though i guess they love their block rewards.

You probably already know this, but official support for Windows 7 ended last year, in January 14, 2020. No more updates (or at least not easily). Anything wrong with that machine, everyone else (but maybe not bitcoiners here) will tell you to update or something.

Yeah I already know that. And I already tried updating the video driver and such but it didnt help. Windows updates I'm not even sure it works anymore on windows 7. i've got them turned off ! i'm not sure i want to change that machine from windows 7 though. but windows updates being not functional, it's kind of sad. i guess i might have to just use a different machine for using electrum because electrum really is my favorite bitcoin wallet pretty much so sad that i have this win 7 issue. but anyhow thans again.

[ranochigo]

\
Well not to bust anyones balls but in the last 4 days (Sept17 through Sept21), they have had 10 blocks over 1GB in size. I just didn't list them but they're there. so that means miners hard drives filled up by at least 10GB in the last 4 days (probably double that). you don't hear bsv miners complainiing though i guess they love their block rewards.

Miners don't complain because they don't have to run a full node. Only pools do and they are compensated by their pool fees. The block size doesn't matter to them, because it means nothing when someone else is paying for it. In the grand scheme of things, actually 0.84EH isn't a lot. When you're trying to prove that 1GB blocks are feasible, it costs nothing to pad your blocks up with transactions of little value and make people think that large blocks are ideal.

Just because I can create an altcoin that pumps 10GB blocks per 10 minutes, doesn't mean that it would be the practical for an actual coin.

[larry_vw_1955]

It goes beyond $300 for an external HDD with 12TB in my country. That's the cheapest I could find on amazon.

But people here would have us believe that hard drive prices are "always going down" lol.

You mean they mined with a block size limit 1GB? They can't have filled a block with 1GB transactions; I mean they must not have more than a thousand transactions every day.

Wrong. As I mentioned, in the last 4 days they mined at least 10 blocks that were at least 1GB in size. As an example, one of them was about 1.8GB and had around 64,000 transactions in it.

[tromp]

miners hard drives filled up by at least 10GB in the last 4 days (probably double that).

Not if they're pruning. Then they just forget about them after verifying.
Makes me wonder how many non-pruning nodes there are on BSV.
How long does it take to sync a BSV node from scratch? Has anyone tried recently?

[NotATether]

Not if they're pruning. Then they just forget about them after verifying.
Makes me wonder how many non-pruning nodes there are on BSV.
How long does it take to sync a BSV node from scratch? Has anyone tried recently?

Well, assuming that you got a 1Gbps line, and your mempool limits are sufficiently high, since the BSV blockchain is almost 800GB large I'd expect it to take twice the amount of time it takes for BTC to perform the IBD. In other words, around 24 to 48 hours or so.

(This is complicated by the fact that they only provide Linux binaries, and a *cough* Docker image).

[larry_vw_1955]

Oh, because the private key is pre-set? That makes sense, yeah. But you can build something similar yourself with a backed up private key.

opendimes can be handed around all over the place and change hands an unlimited number of times but once they get redeemed they can't be used as a bearer instrument anymore. how do you propose to "build something similar yourself with a backed up private key" I'm gonna grab some popcorn and coke and pull up a chair while you explain.

I'd still recommend to reinstall your OS especially if it's an old Windows install. But it's a common issue. Some corrupted residue files are flying around in some Electrum directory, that's why you have no issue with other software, but you do with Electrum.

Well I didn't say I didn't have an issue with other software. But it is rare but there is maybe one other software that had the same issue. Rare though. It's not having anything to do with installed electrum since I use portable versions too. And they have the same problem. Reinstalling the OS is a good bet but I got alot of stuff on the hard drive I dont want to have to reinstall and such.

We are comparing Bitcoin to BSV shitcoin now? Does it come anywhere close to Bitcoin in any aspect? I don't think so. What's the node count? Especially decentralizing a blockchain gets increasingly harder the more resources (read: storage) you require people to buy to run a node.

yeah and from the looks of things, it would be really expensive to store all that bsv blockchain data. I mean just think of 1.8GB blocks popping up here and there. Oops time to make another hard drive purchase. that's probably what the miners are doing, you know? making trips to best buy every friday or every other.

[larry_vw_1955]

Not if they're pruning. Then they just forget about them after verifying.

they cant do tht though. because when people pay to store data they are paying the miners to store it forever.

Makes me wonder how many non-pruning nodes there are on BSV.

there can't be any because see above.

[larry_vw_1955]

And it's more than storage capacity problem.
If you bother to read article mentioned by @NotATether, it's recommended to use high-end computer to run BSV node.

For a listener node that expects a high volume of transactions, the requirements include a minimum 8 12 core/thread CPU, 32GB of RAM and a 1 GB internet connection (up and down).

Yeah those are some steep requirements. But that's good because if I'm gonna be storing my home videos and things I want to make sure they have top notch computer equiment that I can access my data easily and quickly anytime I want to with no downtime. I had hoped that filecoin would be able to deliver on that promise but alas, they wanted to make me pay to store my data temporarily. (Not sure if they ever had a black friday special for lifetime storage.)

Miners don't complain because they don't have to run a full node.

They can be forced to though. if necessary. there are ways to do that. but i guess that's up to bitcoin sv whether they need to. as long as my homevideos are on there forever, i'll be good to go.

Only pools do and they are compensated by their pool fees. The block size doesn't matter to them, because it means nothing when someone else is paying for it.

Well that brings up a good question. Who exactly is paying for it? not that I'm worried about it you understand, just curiious.I mean I had a choice either put my homevideos on youtube but then you never know what might happen to youtube. they might not be around in 100 years.

[larry_vw_1955]

If i correctly understood you, you intend to store file on blockchain because you want 100% uptime with mirror which available worldwide? Bitcoin and most cryptocurrency isn't designed for it and it'll cost you a fortune.

how much do you think it would cost? as long as bitcoin sv miners are honest and store my data, i wouldn't mind paying them a bit to do it. but i need to make sure that they won't pull the rug out from under me.

Was this supposed to be a joke? Shocked Do you think Bitcoin works like this? Shocked Trusting a bunch of Twitter accounts and websites? WTF do you think this is all a joke? Roll Eyes I don't know what to reply to this message, I have no words... We don't trust, we verify, damn, we're not Ethereum or some shit coin that follows a Twitter account or other kind of 'leader'...

yeah it was kind of a joke however, the more i think about it, it's not such a joke. I mean just think of where bitcoin sv might be if the BitcoinAssn hadn't tweeted out to miners and nodes that they needed to invalidate that fraudulent chain by running a particular command on their console. (And to "Please reach out on Twitter" if they had any questions.) I mean where wuold we be?? there might not be such a thing as BSV anymore. But thank goodness for twitter and how effective it was in getting the word out about that fraudulent 51% attack last summer. it's reassuring to know that they stand by ready to tweet in cases of emergency to protect their blockchain's integrity!

[n0nce]

miners hard drives filled up by at least 10GB in the last 4 days (probably double that).

Not if they're pruning. Then they just forget about them after verifying.
Makes me wonder how many non-pruning nodes there are on BSV.
How long does it take to sync a BSV node from scratch? Has anyone tried recently?

Yeah everyone who jumps on a shitcoin's bandwagon to make a quick buck doesn't care about decentralization. So no BSV miner will run an actual full node. They'll have a very small number of full nodes because all they care about is (quick) profit. If the currency tanks, they don't care since they probably cash out in FIAT or BTC daily.

Well I didn't say I didn't have an issue with other software. But it is rare but there is maybe one other software that had the same issue. Rare though. It's not having anything to do with installed electrum since I use portable versions too. And they have the same problem. Reinstalling the OS is a good bet but I got alot of stuff on the hard drive I dont want to have to reinstall and such.

I don't understand how people can use a Windows install for more than half a year at a time. I reinstall OSes regularly and keep data on separate drives, to keep my machines running smoothly. Especially Windows installs... After a few months of Windows updates, driver updates and installed & uninstalled programs, it already starts to get clunky.

We are comparing Bitcoin to BSV shitcoin now? Does it come anywhere close to Bitcoin in any aspect? I don't think so. What's the node count? Especially decentralizing a blockchain gets increasingly harder the more resources (read: storage) you require people to buy to run a node.

yeah and from the looks of things, it would be really expensive to store all that bsv blockchain data. I mean just think of 1.8GB blocks popping up here and there. Oops time to make another hard drive purchase. that's probably what the miners are doing, you know? making trips to best buy every friday or every other.

I don't understand your point. You were saying 'Because BSV is able to store 1GB blocks, Bitcoin should too'. The two aren't comparable though. It was mentioned above that you need a pretty specced-out machine to keep a BSV node running: storage, memory, computing and networking all need to be pretty top notch since this coin seems to push big blocks to the extreme. The number of actual nodes securing that coin must be so small that it would be absolutely inacceptable for Bitcoin.

Also, the initial premise of this whole topic was to make it easier to run a node, as far as I remember, by limiting storage and computing power requirements for the IBD. What BSV is doing, big blocks in general, are absolutely the opposite, as we see in BSV's hardware requirement list. So even if you find a point for the BSV approach of things, it'll be outside this topic's scope.

[DaveF]

yeah and from the looks of things, it would be really expensive to store all that bsv blockchain data. I mean just think of 1.8GB blocks popping up here and there. Oops time to make another hard drive purchase. that's probably what the miners are doing, you know? making trips to best buy every friday or every other.

You are still hung up on blockchain size and you are either just living in your own bubble and don't want to hear it or have some other agenda.
But for the sake of it lets run with BSV. As of today their blockchain is a little under 1TB as can be seen here: https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-sv or here:https://explorer.viawallet.com/bsv/statistics/volume/volume

Even with them pushing out their bogus stupid large blocks they are still not over 1 TB

Now lets do BTC with some really inflated numbers. Although it's below it lets say the blockchain today is 400GB

Now lets say every block from today on out is 4MB and it's 100% filled.

4meg * 6 blocks an hour = 24 meg per hour
24mb * 24 hours = 576 MB a day
576MB * 365 days = 210240 GB per year
So a bit under 4 years go get to 1 TB

Since we have 400GB today and we have now filled 4+ years of blocks that are larger then possible we are still going to fit on a 2TB with your OS and room to spare.
Since you had them running to best buy, here you go https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-blue-2tb-internal-sata-hard-drive-for-desktops/9312076.p?skuId=9312076
$45 for 2TB

On a side note, I just put together a setup to test a node in a box going a bit high end. However:

RPi4 8GB $75
16GB sd card $10
RPi power supply $8
Geekworm NASPi 2.5 inch case $55
2TB 2.5" drive $70

So a little tiny box that can store the blockchain for YEARS and YEARS to come and run a lightning node and an electrum server and some other stuff for under $225
Could easily have shaved $50+ off the price by getting a different case a 4GB Pi and a 1TB Drive.

Stop worrying about the blockchain size.
-Dave

[Dabs]

I would not store my home videos on BSV. That blockchain may not be running in a hundred years. It's possible the miners will keep making money, but I think youtube makes enough money to stick around for at least a hundred years.

I'd spend a couple hundred bucks and just get large spinning hard drives and make backups that way. Or even tape storage. Sorry, this is all OT already.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Well not to bust anyones balls but in the last 4 days (Sept17 through Sept21), they have had 10 blocks over 1GB in size.

What do these weirdos save in their block chain anyways? Whole movies? Why would they publish 10 blocks with 1GB of data each?

But people here would have us believe that hard drive prices are "always going down" lol.

The prices aren't obviously always going down. Take for instance Chia (the cryptocurrency that uses Proof of Storage); the prices of HDDs skyrocketed.

Wrong. As I mentioned, in the last 4 days they mined at least 10 blocks that were at least 1GB in size. As an example, one of them was about 1.8GB and had around 64,000 transactions in it.

Who made 64,000 transactions in BSV? LOL! Are they spamming their own Bitcoin?

How long does it take to sync a BSV node from scratch? Has anyone tried recently?

Probably days, even if it's a shit-fork.

Check this: https://bitcoinsv.io/documentation/miners/system-requirements/

[larry_vw_1955]

What do these weirdos save in their block chain anyways? Whole movies? Why would they publish 10 blocks with 1GB of data each?

All you have to do is go download the blocks and find out. let me know if you discover any good netflix originals.

The prices aren't obviously always going down. Take for instance Chia (the cryptocurrency that uses Proof of Storage); the prices of HDDs skyrocketed.

So there you go! More evidence that hard drive prices and the price of storage is not going to just "keep going down". Not that it has been.

Who made 64,000 transactions in BSV? LOL! Are they spamming their own Bitcoin?

No, it's people that are desperate to send bsv because they been strangleholded by bitcoin's 1MB blocksize limit. Once they were able to convert their BTC into BSV, they started sending money like crazy I'm telling you. I'm afraid if I keep talking about bsv though that Gregory Maxwell is going to delete my account though. Plus he could penalize me for going off topic in this thread which I do apologize for and if he were to ban me I would take full responsibility.

Greg is a smart guy though. Surely he sees the problem with 1mb size blocks and why they encourage high transaction fees.

Now lets say every block from today on out is 4MB and it's 100% filled.

4meg * 6 blocks an hour = 24 meg per hour
24mb * 24 hours = 576 MB a day
576MB * 365 days = 210240 GB per year
So a bit under 4 years go get to 1 TB

I think you meant 210240 MB per year and yes, that's a nice little blueprint for how bitcoin is able to limit its scalability right? If you can only do 210240 MB of transactions per year then you're not going to be competing with visa.

I'm really worried though they might freeze this thread or ban me because it did get a bit OT. But it has been interesting.

I'm not sure about Craig Wright, I mean Satoshi. But he's not a dummy. He has to have some type of brain on him.

I would not store my home videos on BSV. That blockchain may not be running in a hundred years.

That may very well be. It certainly doesn't seem to be a sustainable model having as a goal to push terabyte sized blocks. But you do have to give credit to BSV. They're not just your father's cryptocurrency.

[Syke]

So there you go! More evidence that hard drive prices and the price of storage is not going to just "keep going down". Not that it has been.

A 1 TB drive (good to store another 10 years of bitcoin blocks) costs $30. Storage is not a problem.

[BlackHatCoiner]

All you have to do is go download the blocks and find out. let me know if you discover any good netflix originals.

I really wonder what would happen if a copyrighted video was timestamped in a censorship-resistant block chain. Theoretically, you could upload anything in the BSV chain. The problem is that it'd take you lot of time to sync. Let alone a full node, which would require TBs of storage.

So there you go! More evidence that hard drive prices and the price of storage is not going to just "keep going down". Not that it has been.

You should read the Moore's Law and the prediction about CPUs. That's where Satoshi relied back in 2009.

A 1 TB drive (good to store another 10 years of bitcoin blocks) costs $30. Storage is not a problem.

If we assume that every year we consume the maximal size of blocks (4MB), then it should be 10*210240 = 2,102,400 MBs, which are 2.1 TBs. Not 1.

[ABCbits]

If i correctly understood you, you intend to store file on blockchain because you want 100% uptime with mirror which available worldwide? Bitcoin and most cryptocurrency isn't designed for it and it'll cost you a fortune.

how much do you think it would cost? as long as bitcoin sv miners are honest and store my data, i wouldn't mind paying them a bit to do it. but i need to make sure that they won't pull the rug out from under me.

Let's try calculate the cost of storing single 1080p movie with 2 hours duration.

1. Calculate size of the movie

According to https://www.circlehd.com/blog/how-to-calculate-video-file-size, 1 minute of 1080p video have size 20MB.

Code:

120 minute * 20 MB = 2400 MB (2516582400 byte)

2. Calculate the cost in BSV

https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-sv recommend 1 sat/byte, which means you'll need to pay at least 2.516.582.400 satoshi (25.165824 BSV). This calculation exclude overhead (input, other output, signature, etc.).

3. Convert to USD

According to https://coinmarketcap.com/, current BSV price is $144.12.

Code:

25.165824 BSV * $144.12 = $3626.89...

IMO it's very expensive.


To keep this discussion slightly on-topic, here's estimation of UTXO growth for storing same movie on Bitcoin since OP_RETURN limit is only 80 bytes (and IIRC each transaction only can have one OP_RETURN) and pool most likely won't help you store a movie. I use method which described here http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photographs.html.

1. Getting amount of data can be stored on single address.

According to https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Technical_background_of_version_1_Bitcoin_addresses, bitcoin address size is 25 bytes, but 4 bytes used as checksum and 1 byte used to indicate the address is for mainnet network. So we only can store 20 bytes data on each address.

2. Calculate amount of address required to store the movie.

Code:

2516582400 bytes / 20 bytes = 125829120 address/UTXO

3. Get current size of UTXO set. I use result from running command gettxoutsetinfo on Bitcoin Core (which took few minute to get the result).

Code:

"txouts": 75171403

4. Calculate UTXO growth

Code:

 75171403
125829120 +
-----------
201000523

Code:

125829120 / 75171403 = 1.6738... (167.38%)

If you or someone else actually do this, you'll heavily bloat chainstate and OP's proposal is more likely to be accepted Bitcoin community

P.S. please double check the calculation and source used.

[Syke]

If we assume that every year we consume the maximal size of blocks (4MB), then it should be 10*210240 = 2,102,400 MBs, which are 2.1 TBs. Not 1.

That is a theoretical limit, which has never come close to ever been reached. Average block size is around 1MB.

[Dabs]

This is getting off topic already, but all my home videos are stored in some password protected torrent called "insurance files-bitcoin leaks".

[larry_vw_1955]

Let's try calculate the cost of storing single 1080p movie with 2 hours duration.

Code:

25.165824 BSV * $144.12 = $3626.89...

IMO it's very expensive.

Yeah that is kind of pricey but obviously people are doing it. Otherwise they wouuldn't have 1+GB blocks so often. And to imagine, one day it's going to be terabyte sized blocks that's going to be generating some very serious revenue!

To keep this discussion slightly on-topic, here's estimation of UTXO growth for storing same movie on Bitcoin

Code:

(75171403 + 125829120) / 125829120 = 2.6738... (267.38...%)

Actually it's not quite as bad as your slightly off calculation. The ratio there is 1.597408636411031 so it would only bloat the utxo set by a mere 59 percent.

If you or someone else actually do this, you'll heavily bloat chainstate and OP's proposal is more likely to be accepted Bitcoin community

Someone stored Satoshi's white paper that way apparently. the amazing thing is they only spent about 50 cents less than one us dollar to do that in terms of sending money to all 948 addresses. However, where it really got them is on the transaction fee. if they wouldn't have done that, they would be about $30,000 richer today.

[larry_vw_1955]

I really wonder what would happen if a copyrighted video was timestamped in a censorship-resistant block chain. Theoretically, you could upload anything in the BSV chain. The problem is that it'd take you lot of time to sync. Let alone a full node, which would require TBs of storage.

Well you dont have to wonder. I'm sure it's already been done. You don't think so? I'm sure there's all kinds of data being stored. Maybe some of it is not belonging to the original uploader. I bet someone will upload an entire linux distribution oneday if they haven't already!

Hopefully you won't even have to sync up at all before uploading. That would be really cool.

You should read the Moore's Law and the prediction about CPUs. That's where Satoshi relied back in 2009.

Back in 2009, they probably thought cpus would be running at 20Ghz in 2021. Enough said.

[larry_vw_1955]

If you or someone else actually do this, you'll heavily bloat chainstate and OP's proposal is more likely to be accepted Bitcoin community Roll Eyes

So just a single person trying to upload a 2 hour video off their phone could bring bitcoin to it's knees? That seems kind of bizarre/hard to believe. it's just a single video. i mean one episode of the bachelor even. (chris harrison isn't hosting anymore)

I put wrong formula (now it's fixed). The percentage doesn't represent ratio, but growth (which is 167.38%). But i wouldn't call 59 or 167 percent bloat as "mere".

What if miners just ignored utxos that they didn't think were that important? No one is going to spend a single satoshi so they could just banish utxos like that! But then people's homemade videos might be in jeopardy.

That's not my point, besides the white paper is only few MB and doesn't have noticeable impact on running node.

Thank goodness. Satoshi invented bitcoin and wrote the whitepaper. The last thing we'd want is his whitepaper to be causing a bottleneck on the network. 

[Dabs]

What if miners just ignored utxos that they didn't think were that important?

Miners and pools as a whole and collectively don't usually care. They will include any transactions that have the appropriate minimum fee, starting with those that pay higher fees.

The last few things you've been saying tho, don't seem relevant anymore. We can continue discussing the topic or what OP said, but it's likely nothing will be done about it this decade.

[Syke]

So just a single person trying to upload a 2 hour video off their phone could bring bitcoin to it's knees?

No, it wouldn't. Go ahead and try it. 12 years, 700,000 blocks, you think you're the first to think of spamming the network? Go ahead, try it, let's see how far you get.

[n0nce]

If you or someone else actually do this, you'll heavily bloat chainstate and OP's proposal is more likely to be accepted Bitcoin community Roll Eyes

So just a single person trying to upload a 2 hour video off their phone could bring bitcoin to it's knees? That seems kind of bizarre/hard to believe.

"If it seems too good to be true... it probably is."

(Not sure why anyone would consider it good to bring BTC to its knees, but it seems an altcoin shill like you might like BTC to go down. However, Bitcoin is one of the most attacked software projects after the Linux kernel, probably, and it's still up and well, so any trivial attack idea has been tried thousands of times already, you can bet on that )

Edit:
I'd still love to see you try uploading a video to the blockchain.. (spoiler, it won't work, but feel free trying and wasting your time^{don't take it personal, it's just the way it is} )

[larry_vw_1955]

Edit:
I'd still love to see you try uploading a video to the blockchain.. (spoiler, it won't work, but feel free trying and wasting your time^{don't take it personal, it's just the way it is} )

Well why would I want to upload a video onto a platform that wasn't intended for video. I was just responding to how they uploaded the whitepaper onto the blockchain. But it cetainly seems reasonable that if they could upload satoshi's whitepaper onto the blockchain then you could also upload a short video. for longer videos, there's always bsv. (on bsv, the videos could literally be gigabytes and oneday maybe even terabytes.) and no i'm not a shill. but craig wright is a doctor and doctors know what they're talking about. usually.

[n0nce]

Edit:
I'd still love to see you try uploading a video to the blockchain.. (spoiler, it won't work, but feel free trying and wasting your time^{don't take it personal, it's just the way it is} )

Well why would I want to upload a video onto a platform that wasn't intended for video. I was just responding to how they uploaded the whitepaper onto the blockchain. But it cetainly seems reasonable that if they could upload satoshi's whitepaper onto the blockchain then you could also upload a short video.

Try it! It will be very expensive if it will even work at all! Even short videos are orders of magnitude larger than a few pages of PDF.

but craig wright is a doctor and doctors know what they're talking about. usually.

[larry_vw_1955]

Try it! It will be very expensive if it will even work at all! Even short videos are orders of magnitude larger than a few pages of PDF.

I don't know what your definition of "orders of magnitude" is but I doubt it. Obviously someone wanting to store some video on the blockchain needs to use an optimal compression and frame rate for their video to save money. I mean that goes without saying. Craig Wright figured it out though in that you don't have to worry about any of that on BSV, just upload the full HD video and you're good to go. But I think I could store a small video on the bitcoin blockchain using that method linked to I'm sure of it. By the way not to pimp SV too hard but I'm sure, let me capitalize that. SURE that they make it easy to download the video too which for bitcoin it would be a huge pain in the ass to do. Craight Wright being a doctor you understand he thought of everything...

It sounds like you really want me to try uploading a video to bitcoin though.

[larry_vw_1955]

FYI, i never said Bitcoin would collapse if you do that.

No but you hinted that if someone did this then it might cause changes to have to be made to bitcoin. Which presumably would be those proposed by the OP which are indeed somewhat radical in nature. Some guy uploads a 2.4 GB video to bitcoin and everyone else has to start signaling to the network that they still want their bitcoins or else they get returned to the miners. Sounds about right...

1. How do miner whether an UTXO is important or not?

If they think there's a chance someone is going to be spending it as opposed to not spending it. How they would decide that is up to them. But if I was a miner and I saw a huge number of utxos that were just dust amounts and I did further analysis and saw that the addresses for those utxos didn't have any other utxos i would delete them. And they were old utxos maybe older than a year or two.

2. What do you mean by ignoring UTXO? Simply doesn't index the UTXO or also doesn't include the transaction (which have "useless" UTXO)?

yeah just ignoring the utxo. and delete it out of their database. so that it doesn't exist for them.

Excluding claiming "lost" UTXO, OP's idea theoretically could be implemented on full node software (rather than changing Bitcoin protocol). But it's awkward position between full node and pruned full node, so i doubt anyone bother implement OP's idea.

When he said "There's no need to keep a full chain going all the way back to the genesis block." you can tell from the rest of his argument that he doesn't intend for anyone to be running a full node and that everyone can just run a truncated set of blocks once a certain block has no utxos and none of the blocks before it do either. he argues that there is no need to keep all those blocks around any longer for anyone. and then he goes on to entertain the idea that bitcoin users should then be required to do a signaling process to the network to help support this entire process. it's pretty genius although most bitcoin users would be up in arms if they knew someone was having those type of thought processes. luckily no one reads these old threads too much i guess!

but craig wright is a doctor and doctors know what they're talking about. usually.

CryptoCurrency : Craig Wright Proves He Can Code By Copy-Pasting “Hello World” Program

But he does have more degrees than Vitalik. And he did invent bitcoin so who you gonna trust?

FYI, nobody could stop you as long as you have some technical capability and fair amount of Bitcoin.

Apparently with that particular method you linked to, you don't know the private keys so you will never spend that bitcoin that's the kind of utxos a miner would want to delete if they knew what was going on.

[Shymaa-Arafat]

But if I was a miner and I saw a huge number of utxos that were just dust amounts and I did further analysis and saw that the addresses for those utxos didn't have any other utxos i would delete them. Grin And they were old utxos maybe older than a year or two.

Full nodes are the ones who maintain the UTXOS set and to delete a subset there must be a consensus among them all to do it and consider a TX containing one of those invalid, a soft fork I think.

Miners too must/should maintain a UTXOS set in order to add only valid transactions to their blocks and don't lose their effort & money (in MIT lectures Neha Naurela said in early days of Bitcoin a lot of miners lost a lot of money because they didn't bother to validate TXs before adding to their blocks)

So if u mean miners, not acting as full nodes at the same time, could save space by omitting UTXOS with almost Probability zero of being spent from their copy of the UTXOS set ; yes I think that could be a good idea, as they won't formally change the validation rules they just won't choose them.

[ranochigo]

They can be forced to though. if necessary. there are ways to do that. but i guess that's up to bitcoin sv whether they need to. as long as my homevideos are on there forever, i'll be good to go.

If I earn $1000 from my fees and the storage costs $10 per month, I probably wouldn't complain either.

Well that brings up a good question. Who exactly is paying for it? not that I'm worried about it you understand, just curiious.I mean I had a choice either put my homevideos on youtube but then you never know what might happen to youtube. they might not be around in 100 years.

Do you know what pools are?

Back in 2009, they probably thought cpus would be running at 20Ghz in 2021. Enough said.

For what it's worth, that was never the case. No one cares about the clock speed, because that is irrelevant to CPU processing speed. Moore's law is about the transistor density on chips which has been true for quite a while, and even in the recent generations of CPU, the instructions per clock has advanced far greater than that of the CPU of those days.

Just to address some of the points raised in the thread. As I've said, the point about not invalidating/deleting UTXO has to do with the ethical and practical concerns, where limits have to be arbitrarily defined and that will never happen. Truncating Bitcoin in that sense is NOT impossible, in case you've misunderstood me. It is totally possible, but you're going to be assuming that the pre-defined checkpoint is valid. As of now, it is not an issue because we don't have that sort of problem yet, nor do people want to hassle with it to solve an issue that might never really be one.

I'm not sure why Craig Wright is really in this conversation at all. He was NEVER proven to be Satoshi and the list of addresses he provided turned out to be someone else's[1]. A PhD in Computer Science isn't really that uncommon, and it really does nothing to show their honesty or moral compass. Signature validation are fairly expensive, if you were to actually look it up and compare it with an average computer running a Bitcoin node.


[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200525113441/https://paste.debian.net/plain/1148565

Full nodes are the ones who maintain the UTXOS set and to delete a subset there must be a consensus among them all to do it and consider a TX containing one of those invalid, a soft fork I think.

Hard fork.

[Shymaa-Arafat]

A transaction containing one of those UTXOS will be invalid for those running the new version, valid for those running the old version... isn't that soft fork?

[garlonicon]

isn't that soft fork?

Yes, it is. Even all transactions except coinbase could be invalid in a soft-fork: https://petertodd.org/2016/forced-soft-forks.

[ranochigo]

A transaction containing one of those UTXOS will be invalid for those running the new version, valid for those running the old version... isn't that soft fork?

Hmm, okay I misunderstood what you meant. By not considering those UTXOs, it can be a soft fork because the majority always prevails. Unless there is a divergence between them, for which there would be a messy situation.

I don't agree with the proposal. UTXO size is not a concern for us, not to the extent that would make us resort to draconian measures to intentionally censor and invalidate certain UTXOs. It isn't difficult to store the entire UTXO within your ram, and it certainly isn't impossible to have dynamic caching of it through your ram as well.

[Shymaa-Arafat]

I don't agree with the proposal. UTXO size is not a concern for us, not to the extent that would make us resort to draconian measures to intentionally censor and invalidate certain UTXOs. It isn't difficult to store the entire UTXO within your ram, and it certainly isn't impossible to have dynamic caching of it through your ram as well.

Me neither on deleting people money, yet I did suggested to separate those unlikely to be invoked from any search or Merkle structure to shorten the path length. If they ever invoked, no problem their Merkle proofs will be even much shorter.

[n0nce]

Try it! It will be very expensive if it will even work at all! Even short videos are orders of magnitude larger than a few pages of PDF.

I don't know what your definition of "orders of magnitude" is but I doubt it. Obviously someone wanting to store some video on the blockchain needs to use an optimal compression and frame rate for their video to save money. I mean that goes without saying. Craig Wright figured it out though in that you don't have to worry about any of that on BSV, just upload the full HD video and you're good to go. But I think I could store a small video on the bitcoin blockchain using that method linked to I'm sure of it. By the way not to pimp SV too hard but I'm sure, let me capitalize that. SURE that they make it easy to download the video too which for bitcoin it would be a huge pain in the ass to do. Craight Wright being a doctor you understand he thought of everything...

It sounds like you really want me to try uploading a video to bitcoin though.

I don't have my own definition, I use the one that, well, everyone uses, which is:

The order of magnitude of a number is, intuitively speaking, the number of powers of 10 contained in the number.

The Bitcoin whitepaper is a 180KB 9-page PDF. Any video is at least 1MB, so for sure one order of magnitude larger (thousands of KB vs hundreds of KB). Creating a 1MB video would be a challenge of its own though; and e.g. a 1GB video would be 4 orders of magnitudes larger than the Bitcoin PDF.
This is why I say it's a whole different beast saving a video or saving a 9 page PDF...
The transaction for that PDF cost 20K in today's money, imagine a video that is 10-10,000x larger.

I also don't understand your obsession with Craig Wright all based on him being a doctor. Tons of people are doctors, and there are a lot of doctors who are actually quite dumb, so just because he got a PhD doesn't mean he 'thought of everything' at all! It's really a very bad argument in any discussion - 'this person is a X - they must be right!'...

But if I was a miner and I saw a huge number of utxos that were just dust amounts and I did further analysis and saw that the addresses for those utxos didn't have any other utxos i would delete them.

If you mean you wouldn't mine a transaction like https://mempool.space/tx/54e48e5f5c656b26c3bca14a8c95aa583d07ebe84dde3b7dd4a78f4e4186e713, then I don't understand why. You get your fees, so why would you not mine it? A miner doesn't care much about anything else usually.

[Shymaa-Arafat]

you mean you wouldn't mine a transaction like https://mempool.space/tx/54e48e5f5c656b26c3bca14a8c95aa583d07ebe84dde3b7dd4a78f4e4186e713, then I don't understand why. You get your fees, so why would you not mine it? A miner doesn't care much about anything else usually.

Why would someone make such a TX with this cost (and 938 UTXOS most of them are 1Satoshi) unless it was a dust hack?
It's from 2013 so if it was a hack, it must have been documented somewhere

[n0nce]

you mean you wouldn't mine a transaction like https://mempool.space/tx/54e48e5f5c656b26c3bca14a8c95aa583d07ebe84dde3b7dd4a78f4e4186e713, then I don't understand why. You get your fees, so why would you not mine it? A miner doesn't care much about anything else usually.

Why would someone make such a TX with this cost (and 938 UTXOS most of them are 1Satoshi) unless it was a dust hack?
It's from 2013 so if it was a hack, it must have been documented somewhere

It's not a hack, it's the Bitcoin whitepaper PDF encoded as hex and split up into 938 addresses.
In 2013 it wasn't that expensive. I think in beginning of 2013 the BTC price was around 100 bucks and they paid 0.59BTC in transaction fees, so it cost around $59 to permanently save the whitepaper in the blockchain forever, sounds like a good deal to me

Encoding data into addresses like this is one way to save information into the Bitcoin blockchain, which is the topic we collectively derailed into in the last few days..

You can also check this page which extracts characters which were encoded in some Bitcoin blocks, which is another way to encode data into the blockchain (but just text, not binary like pdf or movie): https://bitcoinstrings.com/

By the way, there's an ASCII image in block 3:

Code: (https://bitcoinstrings.com/blk00003.txt)

File: blk00003.txt

---BEGIN TRIBUTE---
#./BitLen
:::::::::::::::::::
:::::::.::.::.:.:::
:.: :.' ' ' ' ' : :
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=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
LEN "rabbi" SASSAMA
     1980-2011
Len was our friend.
A brilliant mind,
a kind soul, and
a devious schemer;
husband to Meredith
brother to Calvin,
son to Jim and
Dana Hartshorn,
coauthor and
cofounder and
Shmoo and so much
more.  We dedicate
this silly hack to
Len, who would have
found it absolutely
hilarious.
--Dan Kaminsky,
Travis Goodspeed
P.S.  My apologies,
BitCoin people.  He
also would have
LOL'd at BitCoin's
new dependency upon
   ASCII BERNANKE
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----END TRIBUTE----

[Shymaa-Arafat]

Ah, u mean non-standard UTXOS, but that was not the main original topic here maybe it got into it & I skippeded some replies in the middle.
-Still, they could have done it in the OP_Return part without keeping them in the UTXOS set, but probably such techniques were studied after 2013.

[larry_vw_1955]

If I earn $1000 from my fees and the storage costs $10 per month, I probably wouldn't complain either.

Exactly! I mean who wouldn't take a deal like that?

Do you know what pools are?

oh ok so you're saying the bitcoin sv mining pools are the ones storing all the data. sounds plausible.

Back in 2009, they probably thought cpus would be running at 20Ghz in 2021. Enough said.

For what it's worth, that was never the case. No one cares about the clock speed, because that is irrelevant to CPU processing speed.

Wrong. I care about it. It really does have an effect on computer performance. Maybe you meant to say "no one in industry cares about the clock speed" well i might even disagree with you about that too. They care but there's nothing they can do about it.

I'm not sure why Craig Wright is really in this conversation at all.

Well because bitcoin sv is handling huge volumes of data with gigabyte sized blocks and we were talking about blockchain growth and size issues here with bitcoin. Doesn't seem to be a problem for sv.

I also find it fascinating that Craig Wright invented bitcoin sv.

Full nodes are the ones who maintain the UTXOS set and to delete a subset there must be a consensus among them all to do it and consider a TX containing one of those invalid, a soft fork I think.

I was just talking about deleting spam out of the utxo set on an individual basis. They might not be able to verify some blocks if that happened but they could certainly mine new ones.

[ranochigo]

Wrong. I care about it. It really does have an effect on computer performance. Maybe you meant to say "no one in industry cares about the clock speed" well i might even disagree with you about that too. They care but there's nothing they can do about it.

No, you're comparing apples to oranges. In a similar architecture, yes a higher clock speed results in a better performance, simply by the logic of having similar IPCs. The point here is, if you are comparing a 6GHz Core 2 Quad from those days and a 2GHz i5 from today, the i5 wins, hands down simply by the architectural improvement. We are not pursuing higher clock speeds, only better IPCs. Your argument is that the we expected CPUs to be running at higher clock speeds over time, which is untrue. In this thread, we are talking about the increment in the performance of the chips, which is proven true for the past few years.

It isn't difficult to achieve higher clock speeds, if you design a CPU specifically just for it but it won't be efficient.

Well because bitcoin sv is handling huge volumes of data with gigabyte sized blocks and we were talking about blockchain growth and size issues here with bitcoin. Doesn't seem to be a problem for sv.

I also find it fascinating that Craig Wright invented bitcoin sv.

Inventing is not something that I would agree with. Bitcoin SV and Bitcoin are practically the same, save for a few parameter changes.

Again, Apples to Orange comparison. Bitcoin SV has 157 nodes[1], while Bitcoin has 8200 nodes[2]. It doesn't seem to be a problem because those who are using it are obviously supporters of it. You don't have to consider the actual feasibility, which lies in quite a few aspects (block propagation time, block processing time, storage limitation, etc) if you think that is the way a crypto is supposed to function. Bigger blocks are possible, excessively big blocks are possible as well, but there are quite a few drawbacks in the latter.

[1] https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-sv/nodes
[2] https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/nodes

[Shymaa-Arafat]

Basically what i wanted to said is Bitcoin community might reconsider about UTXO indexing (on full node implementation, not Bitcoin protocol), such as,
1. Should client use list which contain of transaction with main/sole purpose of storing arbitrary data?
2. Should all UTXO indexed?
3. If non-indexed UTXO appear on mempool, should the client perform manual lookup (really slow) or partially skip process of transaction verification?

I'm suggesting to partition the UTXO set, so that u insert/delete/verify/search for proofs dealing with each pile separately; clearly all piles will be smaller than the total set

[larry_vw_1955]

No, you're comparing apples to oranges.
...
We are not pursuing higher clock speeds, only better IPCs. Your argument is that the we expected CPUs to be running at higher clock speeds over time, which is untrue. In this thread, we are talking about the increment in the performance of the chips, which is proven true for the past few years.

yeah these days improvements come from improving cpu architecture and adding on more cores but not by pushing the laws of physics about how many transistors you can fit into a given space or how fast you can turn them on and off. that's over and done. the thing is though we have to be careful about using Instructions per cycle as the only metric. power consumption is important too. and cost of the cpu. all those things matter. to really say that things are improiving we need higher performance (more IPC), lower power consumption and also lower cost (on an inflation adjusted basis of course). you got all 3?

Inventing is not something that I would agree with. Bitcoin SV and Bitcoin are practically the same, save for a few parameter changes.

I doubt that. They seem very different from one another. Now I do have to agree that anyone that forks bitcoin didn't really invent bitcoin but of course craig wright is satoshi so he's in a special category

Again, Apples to Orange comparison. Bitcoin SV has 157 nodes[1], while Bitcoin has 8200 nodes[2]. It doesn't seem to be a problem because those who are using it are obviously supporters of it. You don't have to consider the actual feasibility, which lies in quite a few aspects (block propagation time, block processing time, storage limitation, etc) if you think that is the way a crypto is supposed to function. Bigger blocks are possible, excessively big blocks are possible as well, but there are quite a few drawbacks in the latter.

Big blocks encourage very low transaction fees. which is a good thing for users. I mean I think Craig himself said that bitcoin is not for hodling it's for using it like money, spending it. That dude knows his crypto.

[Syke]

yeah these days improvements come from improving cpu architecture and adding on more cores but not by pushing the laws of physics about how many transistors you can fit into a given space or how fast you can turn them on and off. that's over and done.

/sigh. No, it hasn't stopped.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16823/intel-accelerated-offensive-process-roadmap-updates-to-10nm-7nm-4nm-3nm-20a-18a-packaging-foundry-emib-foveros

[n0nce]

we have to be careful about using Instructions per cycle as the only metric. power consumption is important too. and cost of the cpu. all those things matter. to really say that things are improiving we need higher performance (more IPC), lower power consumption and also lower cost (on an inflation adjusted basis of course). you got all 3?

I have to chime in on this: Nobody just cares about IPC. It's just a good way to keep constantly improving performance right now. Also pushing frequency isn't dead yet either; with now mainstream CPUs running at 5GHz easily (Intel 11th gen + Ryzen 5000), while this was considered a super heavy overclock mere years ago.

Power consumption / efficiency is mostly limited by cooling; PC cooling designs haven't changed much in the last, idk, 10-20 years, so since then most of the consumer CPUs have been and still are targeted to run at 95-125W max.

It's also obvious that cost of computing has been ever decreasing; while it was absolutely not normal for everyone to afford a computer in 1975, I now know barely anyone who has just one computer (I count modern mobile phones and tablets as computers as well) anymore.

Inventing is not something that I would agree with. Bitcoin SV and Bitcoin are practically the same, save for a few parameter changes.

I doubt that. They seem very different from one another. Now I do have to agree that anyone that forks bitcoin didn't really invent bitcoin but of course craig wright is satoshi so he's in a special category

You really like to beat a dead horse, don't you? Just fyi, this gets tiring really quick. If you keep reiterating this nonsense in every second post, I (and most others) can't continue reading every reply, it just gets too repetitive and obnoxious.

[ranochigo]

yeah these days improvements come from improving cpu architecture and adding on more cores but not by pushing the laws of physics about how many transistors you can fit into a given space or how fast you can turn them on and off. that's over and done. the thing is though we have to be careful about using Instructions per cycle as the only metric. power consumption is important too. and cost of the cpu. all those things matter. to really say that things are improiving we need higher performance (more IPC), lower power consumption and also lower cost (on an inflation adjusted basis of course). you got all 3?

TDPs of CPUs are mostly within quite a fixed range. 7nm Zen 3 are more efficient than 7nm Zen 2 and 12nm Zen +. As we're getting to smaller node size, architectures are more efficient (performance to power ratio). In fact, all of the criteria that you've listed all hold true. CPUs are cheaper relative to their performance, better performance and basically the same power consumption. Saying that chips are not improving over time is just untrue.

craig wright is satoshi so he's in a special category

I certainly hope that you're not trolling but it feels like I'm talking to a wall at this point in time.

Big blocks encourage very low transaction fees. which is a good thing for users. I mean I think Craig himself said that bitcoin is not for hodling it's for using it like money, spending it. That dude knows his crypto.

Big blocks encourage centralization, by making is far less practical for users to run nodes and relying on SPV or centralized servers instead. Excessively big blocks makes the network less secure, where users are seeing their own versions of the chain. With on-chain scaling, you are still limited to many factors that governs it, be it transaction finality due to the stale rates or just the block intervals. By introducing excessively big blocks, you are scaling Bitcoin by solving something and sacrificing the practicality of it.

I believe that we've made our point with the many pages of discussions. I would encourage you to at least consider the posts and DYOR. It is not a constructive discussion if you were to be so insistent on your views and refusing to acknowledge the facts.

[larry_vw_1955]

I have to chime in on this: Nobody just cares about IPC. It's just a good way to keep constantly improving performance right now. Also pushing frequency isn't dead yet either; with now mainstream CPUs running at 5GHz easily (Intel 11th gen + Ryzen 5000), while this was considered a super heavy overclock mere years ago.

Not sure where you are getting your figures but something like the Core i9-11900K has a base frequency of only 3.50 GHz.

Power consumption / efficiency is mostly limited by cooling; PC cooling designs haven't changed much in the last, idk, 10-20 years, so since then most of the consumer CPUs have been and still are targeted to run at 95-125W max.

If you're talking about something like a Core i9-11900K then that thing goes up to nearly 300 watts peak.

It's also obvious that cost of computing has been ever decreasing; while it was absolutely not normal for everyone to afford a computer in 1975, I now know barely anyone who has just one computer (I count modern mobile phones and tablets as computers as well) anymore.

Well yeah I mean if you go all the way back to 1975 but I'd say in the last 10 years, the cost of computing has not gone down at all. Not a single penny.

You really like to beat a dead horse, don't you? Just fyi, this gets tiring really quick. If you keep reiterating this nonsense in every second post, I (and most others) can't continue reading every reply, it just gets too repetitive and obnoxious.

Sorry about that. But to me, the doctor belongs getting credit for his invention. I used to think he was a fraud too but that's because I just listened to what other people said about him. I never took the time to actually listen to what he had to say and he's got alot of videos out there on youtube. So people can decide for themself. I already decided for myself who satoshi is.

Saying that chips are not improving over time is just untrue.

Well I agree they are still improving over time but not at the rate they once did. Like if you compare 2005 to 2020 progression to 2020 to 2035 it's not going to be as dramatic. And that will likely continue with an exponentially decreasing improvement factor. Unless there is some huge breakthrough like photonic computing.

I believe that we've made our point with the many pages of discussions. I would encourage you to at least consider the posts and DYOR. It is not a constructive discussion if you were to be so insistent on your views and refusing to acknowledge the facts.

I've said pretty much everything I needed to say. And I appreciate all the input from you and others. What you said about large block sizes is probably correct.  

[Dabs]

CSW is a little off topic here. He is a fraud. Can't sign proof. And someone else signed proof that he is a fraud using addresses he claims he owned. But that's off topic and should be discussed in the scam threads. There's a few around there.

[n0nce]

I have to chime in on this: Nobody just cares about IPC. It's just a good way to keep constantly improving performance right now. Also pushing frequency isn't dead yet either; with now mainstream CPUs running at 5GHz easily (Intel 11th gen + Ryzen 5000), while this was considered a super heavy overclock mere years ago.

Not sure where you are getting your figures but something like the Core i9-11900K has a base frequency of only 3.50 GHz.

Hey Sherlock, you know what? It goes even lower when idle. Usually we look at the boost clocks, because that's what a processor runs at when you give it work to perform.

Also, as we can see from 3950X to 5950X the all-core load (blender render) improved a lot and only pulled 120W in the latest version; as I said, modern CPUs are targeted at anywhere between 95 and 120W.

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72AHENDeTEI

I'm aware Intel (which is not the leader of CPU performance right now) can be overclocked to pull much more than that, but we should compare apples to apples, in my opinion.

The 5950X boosts up to over 5GHz without overclock (so within the given TDP), for an example. You're wrong in thinking performance doesn't keep increasing.

For more info:
https://www.technipages.com/base-clock-and-boost-clock-explained
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_frequency_scaling

Well yeah I mean if you go all the way back to 1975 but I'd say in the last 10 years, the cost of computing has not gone down at all. Not a single penny.

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/06/18/cost-of-a-computer-the-year-you-were-born/39557187/

A PowerBook G4 cost $5,000 in 2001, while today a MacBook M1 costs $1,000, so it seems to me prices did go down. Also consider that 5K is adjusted for inflation - in 2019. It is probably even more in 2001 dollar valuation.

Another source that suggests performance does continue to increase:
https://ourworldindata.org/technological-progress

This is now a HUGE tangent from the thread and I'd like to end it for the sake of the original topic.