Will the blockchain size explode when Bitcoin goes mainstream?

[tyz]

The Bitcoin blockchain reached the size of 70 gigabyte recently. This happened without Bitcoin has arrived in the mainstream. The user group of Bitcoin is still limited to a few tens of thousands. I wonder what would happen if Bitcoin is entering the mainstream and would no longer be used by a few tens of thousands but millions of people. Then, the blockchain size would explode, wouldn't it? Are there already solutions for this problem?

[DarkHyudrA]

Centralization of the distribution of the blockchain. So people would start using more Electrum and other wallets.
Even Sathoshi predicted it, and some older user will be able to quote it for you.

Although I feel you're only asking this to bump you post count since you already have 4k posts, but whatever.

[DannyHamilton]

The Bitcoin blockchain reached the size of 70 gigabyte recently. This happened without Bitcoin has arrived in the mainstream. The user group of Bitcoin is still limited to a few tens of thousands. I wonder what would happen if Bitcoin is entering the mainstream and would no longer be used by a few tens of thousands but millions of people. Then, the blockchain size would explode, wouldn't it? Are there already solutions for this problem?

Right now the blockchain can't grow by more than about 144 megabytes per day no matter how many people are using bitcoin.  That's the way the protocol works.  On average once every 10 minutes a block is added to the blockchain, and that block can't be any larger than 1 megabyte.

If the protocol changes in the future then it could grow faster (or slower), but it's impossible to predict right now if the protocol  will change (or how).

[Yakamoto]

Technically, if I am correct, the blockchain size would only escalate with the size and quantity of blocks, and thus even if Bitcoin goes mainstream it would still grow at a relatively linear and predictable rate.

If the blocksizes were changed, however, it would explode. This means light wallets or other similar software will become more common and valuable and widely used in the future.

[Velkro]

Centralization of the distribution of the blockchain. So people would start using more Electrum and other wallets.
Even Sathoshi predicted it, and some older user will be able to quote it for you.

Which wouldn't be bad choice while waiting to bitcoin network expand to be able to handle such traffic.

[ATguy]

The Bitcoin blockchain reached the size of 70 gigabyte recently. ... Are there already solutions for this problem?

Yes, you can enable pruning to few gigabytes if hdd storage is a issue for you. Almost 8 years of Bitcoin transactions take as much space as few full HD movies you might download and watch in one evening... no big deal - technology evolved a lot in the past ten years.

[Carlton Banks]

Are there already solutions for this problem?

Lightning Network. Instant transaction confirmation, orders of magnitude more transaction capacity, transactions are fully validated in the same way that current transactions are (with the exception that they can take a considerable amount of time to end up included in a block).

Blocksize increases are the worst way to increase the transaction throughput, which doesn't mean they should be ruled out altogether, just that everything else should be done to increase throughout before blocksize increases, such that the increase itself can be more effective (which is way of viewing the rationale behind segregated witness; making better use of the blockspace available by making the transactions smaller instead of the blocks bigger)

[European Central Bank]

Can't we predict almost exactly how big the blockchain's gonna be? Transactions divided by block size. I can see that the fancier stuff like Ehtereum might spiral into something massive but other bitcoin uses sound like it'll be side chain stuff which settles those predictable blocks.

[countryfree]

This isn't the main issue. The block size is limiting the number of transactions per day, and that's the real problem: Bitcoin cannot go mainstream. The blockchain has grown by about 3 GB last month, but nobody cares. With larger blocks, the growth could be ten times that, picking up one GB a day, but this should not be a problem.

[Cuidler]

With larger blocks, the growth could be ten times that, picking up one GB a day, but this should not be a problem.

I doubt you could get one GB a day any time soon even if the blocksize limit is 8 MB as many miners today signal readiness for. It took last few years to finally almost reach Bitcoin hardcoded 1 MB limits we see from this year, so historically Bitcoin adoption grows slowly and steadily:

https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-block-size?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

[Carlton Banks]

This isn't the main issue. The block size is limiting the number of transactions per day, and that's the real problem: Bitcoin cannot go mainstream. The blockchain has grown by about 3 GB last month, but nobody cares. With larger blocks, the growth could be ten times that, picking up one GB a day, but this should not be a problem.

There's more than one way to increase the transaction rate. You're implying blocksize is the only way, it's not. It's the worst way.

[Cuidler]

There's more than one way to increase the transaction rate. You're implying blocksize is the only way, it's not. It's the worst way.

You can centralize transactions on offchain and put only the final state on the blockchain. Many exchanges and gambling sites doing it already. But we are talking about decentralized onchain transactions which Bitcoin is all about, there exist many offchain transactions already which are not stored on blockchain - adding lighting as next offchain option wont magically solve the problem.

[Snorek]

If you want to use Bitcoin as payment method there is no requirement to use software wallet which use full blockchain validation (Bitcoin Core, Armory).
So general statistical bitcoin users don't care about blockchain size.

And if you insist on using Full Validation Wallets then current hard drives technology can easily store terabytes of data.

I see no problem with size of blockchain file, there are however problems with transactions limits, blocksize etc.

[Carlton Banks]

there exist many offchain transactions already which are not stored on blockchain - adding lighting as next offchain option wont magically solve the problem.

Ok, you don't understand Lightning yet. Lightning is best described as pre-chain, not off-chain.


All Lightning transactions will be live on the network, which means that all the usual validation goes into assessing their veracity. The difference is that they will have timelocks set on the execution of the transaction, and so they will stay in the transaction queue (pre-chain) until the timelock expires (similar status-wise to today where you broadcast a transaction, the rest of the network is seeing it, but it hasn't confirmed yet).

The innovative part is that this all allows multiple transactions to be aggregated together into one big transaction representing the net effect of all it's component transactions, and consequently uses the blockspace available much more efficiently. And so the transaction fees are being touted as so small that the overall scaling+adoption potential is just what one would want for Bitcoin: scaling to billions of users using the minimum of resources.

[NyeFe]

There's problems everywhere for bitcoin.
At the moment the network can handle an average of 300k transactions per/day.

Imagine if 200k users from each country decided to send a single transactions at any point, in a single day? - that's a disaster waiting to happen.

Personally the best solution that's out there, would be to have regional blockchains for each country, and have a hash value of the total confirmed transactions of the day, stored in the main blockchain.

So a block on the main chain would be created per day, and each transaction within that block would represent a country (a hash of the total mined blocks of the country).

[Cuidler]

overall scaling+adoption potential is just what one would want for Bitcoin: scaling to billions of users using the minimum of resources.

To be honest I understand Lightning and I welcome when it comes because I see it as best offchain solution possible, Im just more realistic. With 1 MB onchain blocksize, you can open or close only about 300.000 lighting channels daily, to let 1 billion of users open one lighting channel each would take about 10 years alone , another 10 years to close all these opened lighting channels and update the blockchain with final states.

Even though you can make almost unlimited transactions on every opened lighting channel before you close it, there is no magic with 1 MB and scaling to billions of users ever possible - you still need opening and closing the lighting channels relatively often as hardly anyone likes to have locked coins for too long.

[Carlton Banks]

overall scaling+adoption potential is just what one would want for Bitcoin: scaling to billions of users using the minimum of resources.

Even though you can make almost unlimited transactions on every opened lighting channel before you close it, there is no magic with 1 MB and scaling to billions of users ever possible

Ok, but you said 1MB, not me. I said "minimum", you even quoted it.

And if you really understand Lightning, what's all this "off-chain" talk, or comparing it to off-chain systems with 3rd party liability (i.e. zero veracity)? And now you're coming up with detailed understanding of Lightning, and you're arguing against it using spurious reasoning (there is little incentive to close channels if that bumps the fees, and no reason to fear "tying up" coins in a channel. Unspent coins can still be spent, and coins you have spent aren't coming back, nothing is "tied-up" except money you've spent to addresses you don't control). That only demonstrates a further lack of understanding, but this time it seems more disingenuous than uninformed.

[mkc]

I hope people will increase transaction fee, that way miner can have more incentives. Over the long run this will be better for everyone.

[bladeandsoulguide]

no the blockchain size will not explode