Why do you need to download 7 years of chain block

[TransaDox]

I think that in the future there wont be one blockchain downloaded for each user as it is today but more like one per household. A family will setup a computer and download the blockchain and keep it up to date while useing other wallets to point to that BC for verification and use. A family shares resources, there is only 1 fridge, 1 stove, 1 safe,  etc. Yes more can be had but typically only 1 per household. Same will happen with businesses and such.

The chain is growing pretty fast and maybe one day we will reach a point where its tough to download but technology is also fast moving. I remember using dialup to downlaod Photoshop years ago.... took 3 days, but it was worth the trouble. Bitcoin is the same, if you want to use it then you'll do whats needed.

I think that's just clutching at a fantasy because you know deep down it's untenable.

Today in my pocket I have a tap & pay debit credit card that I can use in any shop around the world. I choose the product. Tap and wait for the fries. In the future I will still have a tap and pay card and the bitcoin part of it will be in HSBCs datacenter as it transfers funds from my account over to Bank of America account. Why am I going to buy a top of the range PC to tun a single piece of software so that my family have to use another different  piece of awkward software just to send some birthday money?

[Jet Cash]

Am I missing something here? If you don't want to maintain the entire blockchain, you can run in pruned mode, and/or not download the segwit records (when they are in general use).

[TransaDox]

Am I missing something here? If you don't want to maintain the entire blockchain, you can run in pruned mode, and/or not download the segwit records (when they are in general use).

Full nodes are required to maintain the security of the blockchan. SPVs and online wallets don't do this and full nodes are disappearing as the amount of hardware needed to run one increases (disk space mainly). There are two current views of how to halt the decline.

1) Try to figure out how to make a full node profitable because only money is an incentive, right?
2) Reduce the hardware requirement and make all clients full nodes.  No incentive required and increase the number of nodes by an order of magnitude.

Guess which one all the miners want?

[will_k]

SPV wallets relies on a trusted servers...does that mean it's also not 'decentralized'?

[tsoPANos]

If every node enables pruning, new nodes won't be able to sync the chain on top of the genesis block, they would need to trust a third party to receive an updated chain. Practically if this happens (very unlikely in short-mid term) it will have disastrous implications on decentralization and security.
Afaik there are plans to distribute the block chain data on nodes to address the problem.

However there will still be the need to sync the entire history, which will increasingly uncomfortable in the future.
There is an interesting idea on a "Bitcoin Onchain Pruning" solution,but I don't know to what extent it can work.

[data1]

downloading the full blockchain is nessasary because if anyone tryed to insert a fauls transactuon into the network then every other pc will found it and will say hah nice try :p

[lueosjsir]

true, more like one per household.

[AmDD]

I think that in the future there wont be one blockchain downloaded for each user as it is today but more like one per household. A family will setup a computer and download the blockchain and keep it up to date while useing other wallets to point to that BC for verification and use. A family shares resources, there is only 1 fridge, 1 stove, 1 safe,  etc. Yes more can be had but typically only 1 per household. Same will happen with businesses and such.

The chain is growing pretty fast and maybe one day we will reach a point where its tough to download but technology is also fast moving. I remember using dialup to downlaod Photoshop years ago.... took 3 days, but it was worth the trouble. Bitcoin is the same, if you want to use it then you'll do whats needed.

I think that's just clutching at a fantasy because you know deep down it's untenable.

Today in my pocket I have a tap & pay debit credit card that I can use in any shop around the world. I choose the product. Tap and wait for the fries. In the future I will still have a tap and pay card and the bitcoin part of it will be in HSBCs datacenter as it transfers funds from my account over to Bank of America account. Why am I going to buy a top of the range PC to tun a single piece of software so that my family have to use another different  piece of awkward software just to send some birthday money?

Top range computer? You mean a rpi with a multi TB hard drive attached? so less than $100 investment? Sure that means buying the hardware and building it, that means linux and such which isnt something an average person can do however by the time this is needed someone will have created a product that you buy and plug in. Actually, it already exists... its just not cheap.

I will say that one per household may be a stretch but what about ISPs offering them? The internet works by DNS servers but I dont have one in my house, I use theone offered by my ISP. Same with a mail server, I dont use one thats setup in my home but rather one managed by my ISP. This gets us away from decentralization a bit so Im not sure its a good answer but I can see it happening.

[TransaDox]

I will say that one per household may be a stretch but what about ISPs offering them? The internet works by DNS servers but I dont have one in my house, I use theone offered by my ISP. Same with a mail server, I dont use one thats setup in my home but rather one managed by my ISP. This gets us away from decentralization a bit so Im not sure its a good answer but I can see it happening.

Sure. And we'll all use web wallets connected to the full nodes supplied by the miners. You won't have one of those full nodes in your house either. Why you think an ISP is going to offer a full node, I have no idea.

The single ledger on every machine is the trivial,naive solution. They are not even using torrent tech to distribute it so you scream at 8 nodes to give you the data and hope they have decent connections. The real solution is a distributed file system so the ledger is spread around the cloud and you index the blocks as you need them. Then you only need a cache of the latest few once you have done the first bootstrap.

[data1]

why do not we make a online storage which our software can be linked with i mean like a bootstrap script when we include in our webpage in the same manner we should include this

[MyBTT]

why do not we make a online storage which our software can be linked with i mean like a bootstrap script when we include in our webpage in the same manner we should include this

For one, this would be centralizing the script, where everyone takes information from the same source. This provider could change and edit the information and users will use it.

Server issues?

[zimmah]

I think that in the future there wont be one blockchain downloaded for each user as it is today but more like one per household. A family will setup a computer and download the blockchain and keep it up to date while useing other wallets to point to that BC for verification and use. A family shares resources, there is only 1 fridge, 1 stove, 1 safe,  etc. Yes more can be had but typically only 1 per household. Same will happen with businesses and such.

The chain is growing pretty fast and maybe one day we will reach a point where its tough to download but technology is also fast moving. I remember using dialup to downlaod Photoshop years ago.... took 3 days, but it was worth the trouble. Bitcoin is the same, if you want to use it then you'll do whats needed.

you can even take that further, and have some kind of mini-societies of people who trust each other all point to one node one of the people in that mini-society owns.

Such as a family and some close friend of that family and family of that family.

Like mother-in-laws and brothers and sisters (who each have their own families).

As long as you trust each other there should be no problem.

[Jalinco]

ok, so I installed bitcoin core latest version and it downloaded over 80G of chain block. Let's assume, just for the fun of it, there are 1000 bitcoin core users out there. That's ~8T of wasted disk space. and considering bitcoin will live another 7 years and it will grow of couse, that's like ~20T of disk space (1000 users remember?) for what? couldn't be a centerlaize, maybe mirrored, location that the client will ask for the chain block from there? Why do we need to download it?

The entire purpose of downloading the entire blockchain is to independently verify it and allow for the independent verification of every single block and transaction that occurs later. The only thing that a full node needs to "trust" is the genesis block, the very first block of the blockchain. This is actually hard coded into the software so that there is a defined starting point. After that, the node downloads all of the blocks from its peers. It will check each transaction in the block, and then check the block to ensure that it is valid. Because each block is chained together and transactions are also chained together, it is not possible to start from any point in the blockchain other than the beginning and still maintain trustlessness.

Thank you very much for this answer i too had the same question as the thread creator and this helps sum things up for me!

[mindrust]

To me, Electrum and the other wallets like it are no different than holding your money on the online exchanges. You don't own your money. Somebody else does. They just let you to control your money as you like.

 The original wallet on the otherside, is the real deal. You actually own your money. (I assume there isn't anything shady in the code)

[jak3]

we need to download the whole bitcoin network because its will also help bitcoin system to verify each and every transaction and nothing can breake the chain and yes its wasting a lot of space

[rphk]

 down loading of whole bitcoin transaction may necessary to validate in case if any transaction re verification etc . but only thing is as you said it occupies more storage on physical drive , but need to concentrate on compressing those files and reducing the so that you can save some disk space.

[lin1324235]

我来学习看看。

[nisya]

with only under 10 mbps, it needs too long to download chain block

[digaran2]

ok, so I installed bitcoin core latest version and it downloaded over 80G of chain block. Let's assume, just for the fun of it, there are 1000 bitcoin core users out there. That's ~8T of wasted disk space. and considering bitcoin will live another 7 years and it will grow of couse, that's like ~20T of disk space (1000 users remember?) for what? couldn't be a centerlaize, maybe mirrored, location that the client will ask for the chain block from there? Why do we need to download it?

just because the basic concept of bitcoin, it's a decentralised ledger, no authority, no banks

[fikihafana]

It's too big to download it. Sad story using tekcoin i need to sync it manually (can not from bootstrap) and it tooks around 2 weeks to complete it.