FACT CHECK: Bitcoin Blockchain will be 700GB in 4 Years

[coins101]

My guess is that the Bitcoin Blockchain is growing at around 4% per month.



Is that assessment about right?

And what about the bandwidth each node will require each month if it's sharing data - 100 TB / month; 1,000TB / month?

What does this mean for the next halving?  All miners will be running SPV's?

Note that this chart s on LOG scale.



Also, there's a ridiculous artificial 1MB cap on the blockchain size right now, so it increases slower, but at the same time it's limiting the growth and adaptation of bitcoin, so the limit has to go.

We shouldn't worry about the scaling too much, we just need to make sure the blockchain is allowed to grow, and we don't impose stupid artificial limits on it.

That's actually very interesting, thanks.

However, bandwidth caps are a very real issue especially on residential connections. We already have seen in the media threats by internet service providers wanting to cap and meter bandwidth because of the rise in HD movies....In 4 years, the issue will become even more of a problem because of 4k video, and then 8k video 4 years after that.

Having a full node that requires substantial bandwidth when the blockchain is approaching 1TB is going to be a problem.

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[Kprawn]

Would it not be possible to buy a harddrive with the blockchain already on it?
Downloading 700GB P2P, I guess that would take weeks or even months.
Every package sent around the globe usually is faster.
In 4 years, a 700 GB USB stick will be a normal thing.

1TB usb is currently around $600. Plus, loading fees, plus delivery, plus taxes, lets say its around $400 $300 delivered to your door in 4 years. Would you buy one?

Don't forget that monthly bandwidth cost.

Why do you want to store the Blockchain on the most expensive media? Just drop it on a inexpensive 3.5" harddrive and you set to go. The cost

of harddrives are cheap in relation to memory sticks and the size & price ratio of older drives {second hand drives} are also very affordable. I can

get second hand drives for next to nothing. You can put loads of smaller second hand drives in a RAID configuration.  

I was responding to the question. If you look, he or she talks about a USB.

Agreed, but why use a USB memory stick to do that, if you can use a cheap second hand harddrive. You can overnight courier the drive for

even less... the 2.5" harddrives are a bit more expensive, but they weigh less.  .. For every problem, there is a solution. If a friend of mine,

have bandwidth issues, I will copy the Blockchain on one of these cheap harddrives, and courier it to him. Daily bandwidth use after that,

should not be an issue. Some clever entrepreneur can take this idea and make some profit charging people for this service. 

[calkob]

we gift, i just bought a 5TB hard drive for under a £100.  can you imagine how cheap it will be in four years........ #MOORESLAW 

[awesome31312]

Quantum Computers are advancing much faster in calc and storage capacity. In 4 years from now, QCs will have cracked the blockchain, and Bitcoin will be gone, or at least, residing on a QC.

Wrong.

You could have been right though, if you were aware of some mathematical facts:



What we do know is that internet speed is advancing at a rate nowhere close to the rate the Blockchain is growing, I hope people have prepared for themselves some real life hobbies, especially since downloading the Blockchain will become a long process (taking a couple of weeks), andBitcointalk.org will experience more DDoS attacks.

We have underestimated quantum computers in a big way.

I agree with that, but we're not there yet.

It means absolutely nothing.

I disagree, internet speeds will never be able to cope with maintaining a 1 TB download to a duration of less than a week. This is not even counting the daily synchronizations necessary for spending/receiving coins. It could be a couple of Gigabytes for all we know.

Except for one thing. As the video showed, quantum computers act in such an entirely different way that there is no way to compare them with regular PCs. Certainly, if they can touch other universes, they might be able to find all the pieces of the blockchain elsewhere, other than the blockchain right here. then, all that they need do is bring that info home to Mommy.

We would have to be able to understand their language.

There is already quantum-proof encryption, and we can easily change bitcoins proof-of-work to a quantum proof system when that becomes necessary.

When do you think we will get to that point? A couple years maybe?

[veleten]

the main problem with the huge blockchain size is bitcoin getting even more centralised
less nodes,regular users less likely to use core wallets,more companies like mycelium to provide easy to use no-need-to-synch wallets
it is hard to convince a btc newbie to start to use btc core wallet now as it is-who would want to wait several days and download gigabytes of data when you want it   here and now.

[awesome31312]

Would it not be possible to buy a harddrive with the blockchain already on it?
Downloading 700GB P2P, I guess that would take weeks or even months.
Every package sent around the globe usually is faster.
In 4 years, a 700 GB USB stick will be a normal thing.

1TB usb is currently around $600. Plus, loading fees, plus delivery, plus taxes, lets say its around $400 $300 delivered to your door in 4 years. Would you buy one?

Don't forget that monthly bandwidth cost.

Ok, let's say we put it on a ssd. You get a 1TB ssd today for about 200$. In four years maybe 50$.

Way off. We are talking about internet speed, not RAM here

[coins101]

the main problem with the huge blockchain size is bitcoin getting even more centralised
less nodes,regular users less likely to use core wallets,more companies like mycelium to provide easy to use no-need-to-synch wallets
it is hard to convince a btc newbie to start to use btc core wallet now as it is-who would want to wait several days and download gigabytes of data when you want it   here and now.

I agree with that. Newbies up, full nodes down. At some point that equation fails.

[zimmah]

That is why core devs don't want to raise the block size, it is a very risky thing to do. I know a block size increase will come but not for now. Also we will eventually have a way to prune the blockchain and not need to download the whole blockchain the first time, or I hope so.

They have other reasons, they want to push blockstream so they can pay those multi-million investments back by stealing fees that belong to the miners from users by gaming the Bitcoin transaction system. It does not matter to them that they kill Bitcoin in the process. They'll likely just reinvest in alts anyway.    

By the way, 700 gigabyte in 4 years may sound like a lot, but it's really not.    

A 1 TB hard drive can easily fit that and it's cheap, especially if you only need to buy one every 4 years.  

And by the time it's full, even bigger hard drives will be even cheaper.    

Blocksize is no problem, hard disks are cheap and will become cheaper all the time. No need to limit ourselves.    

What if Bitcoin was invented in 1980 on people insisted the blockchain had to fit on a floppy? Don't .imit yourself by outdated ideas. Technology does not stand still, why should you?

the main problem with the huge blockchain size is bitcoin getting even more centralised
less nodes,regular users less likely to use core wallets,more companies like mycelium to provide easy to use no-need-to-synch wallets
it is hard to convince a btc newbie to start to use btc core wallet now as it is-who would want to wait several days and download gigabytes of data when you want it   here and now.

It's better to risk having less full nodes than to have the (on-chain) transactions themselves get centralized because the blocksize is so small that only really rich people can afford to make on-chain transactions and the rest will be handled by what basically are payment processors.     

We don't need to turn Bitcoin into PayPal 2.0. We don't need that. And it's very bad for decentralization.

[1 currency now]

700 GB isn't that bad because we have Bitcoin Clients that sync the data with a virtual bootstrap so the Bitcoin Client is able to view transactions via real-time.


It was pretty much stated before...If Bitcoin is alive in 4 years it shouldn't be a big issue because we would most likely have high quality fiber cables that transmit faster internet speeds.

Just watch out though..

[TraderBill]

the main problem with the huge blockchain size is bitcoin getting even more centralised
less nodes,regular users less likely to use core wallets,more companies like mycelium to provide easy to use no-need-to-synch wallets
it is hard to convince a btc newbie to start to use btc core wallet now as it is-who would want to wait several days and download gigabytes of data when you want it   here and now.

They could always do a soft or hard fork to implement something like HEAT's unlimited scalability:
http://heatledger.com/HEATWhitepaper.pdf

For storing the consensus blockchain, HEAT does not use single blockchain file ever increasing in size. Instead HEAT makes use of serialized blockchain files of a limited size, accompanied by small balance files. When the latest blockchain file reaches threshold size (of a few GB, specified at genesis block) the protocol will automatically switch to a new blocks file cryptographically linked to the previous blocks & balance files.

Take out the embedded database and implement a memory-mapped-files system.  This allows full nodes to run while only saving the most recent 720 blocks.

Or bitcoin nodes become increasingly concentrated in data centers instead of on home computers, which I don't think is that big of a deal, as long as they're not all in the same data center.

[Wind_FURY]

A 1 TB hard drive can easily fit that and it's cheap, especially if you only need to buy one every 4 years.  

And by the time it's full, even bigger hard drives will be even cheaper.    

Blocksize is no problem, hard disks are cheap and will become cheaper all the time. No need to limit ourselves.    

What if Bitcoin was invented in 1980 on people insisted the blockchain had to fit on a floppy? Don't .imit yourself by outdated ideas. Technology does not stand still, why should you?

That is a poor excuse and I hope the Bitcoin core developers are not thinking the same way as you are. Just because hard drives are getting cheap, do you think that the core developers should not find ways to improve pruning and other measures to prevent the blockchain's bloating size? Whatever other people say about offline transactions I still believe it should be one feature that should be explored and tested as soon as possible.

Also please remember that bandwidth is the bigger issue here than storage.

[coins101]

Crossing the Rubicon:


https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/56bths/to_all_the_people_running_full_nodes_we_thank_you/

[countryfree]

the main problem with the huge blockchain size is bitcoin getting even more centralised
less nodes,regular users less likely to use core wallets,more companies like mycelium to provide easy to use no-need-to-synch wallets
it is hard to convince a btc newbie to start to use btc core wallet now as it is-who would want to wait several days and download gigabytes of data when you want it   here and now.

Yes, that's the real issue. The price is irrevelant. No new user will get core wallets, and old users who change computers will move to multibit or some other software which doesn't require the blockchain. I usually switch off my computer at night, and I can't imagine leaving it running for more than a week to download a one TB file. That will be the blockchain in 5 or 10 years from now.

[Velkro]

My guess is that the Bitcoin Blockchain is growing at around 4% per month.



Is that assessment about right?

And what about the bandwidth each node will require each month if it's sharing data - 100 TB / month; 1,000TB / month?

What does this mean for the next halving?  All miners will be running SPV's?

by me it will be current size +120 GB ... not 700 GB...
Your calculation is wrong, and it should be below 200 GB instead 700 GB, so almost anyone can handle it...

[ranochigo]

the main problem with the huge blockchain size is bitcoin getting even more centralised
less nodes,regular users less likely to use core wallets,more companies like mycelium to provide easy to use no-need-to-synch wallets
it is hard to convince a btc newbie to start to use btc core wallet now as it is-who would want to wait several days and download gigabytes of data when you want it   here and now.

Yes, that's the real issue. The price is irrevelant. No new user will get core wallets, and old users who change computers will move to multibit or some other software which doesn't require the blockchain. I usually switch off my computer at night, and I can't imagine leaving it running for more than a week to download a one TB file. That will be the blockchain in 5 or 10 years from now.

Satoshi has already predicted this happening at the start of Bitcoin and there is a section for that in his whitepaper. In 5 to 10 years time, the internet would probably be a lot faster with a higher fiber pentration rate.

Normal users can run SPV client without a security risk if they can find a trustable full node backing it.

[coins101]

so almost anyone can handle it...

Tell it to this guy who has already switch off his node:

Crossing the Rubicon:


https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/56bths/to_all_the_people_running_full_nodes_we_thank_you/


image not directly relate to above reddit comment.

[RealBitcoin]

And if these hardforker morons with their 2mb - 16mb blocks get their way, then it will be petabytes in notime.

Seriously, how can somebody be so stupid to support block increase?

[vapourminer]

yeah that initial download is a killer. i have a 1.5 gigabit connection, yes gigabit, not gigabyte. downloading it from scratch at this size is not realistic for me. only reason i have it at all is because i started in 2013 or so when the size wasnt too bad and kept with it every day.

my bandwidth is so bad that i regularly backup the blockchain to several places so i dont have to download it again if it gets corrupted, just start  from last backup which is about every week or so.

[darklus123]

in some ways this is very technical so it really requires a lot of analytical thinking. But as a not so technical type of person like me i also know that this thing would really happens but as we can see processor's of the computers are also innovating right? so i think their system could still afford to do so.

[marleybobthedog]

Do to continuous usage of bitcoin transaction it's not surprising to hear that blockchain's size will be 700GB
 It's of normal size. Even a medium e commerce site would generate 1TB data in 1 year. As I had worked in a live project so it's of normal size.