Why do you need to download 7 years of chain block

[stevo401]

In Australia most of our ADSL lines cap out at around 300kbps download - so if you want to download the blockchain then you better start 2 and a half days earlier than you actually want it. I wonder if eventually we will move to a centralised archive of transactions up to a certain date and 'reset' the local blockchain (similar to what happens with a web wallet now). As long as you trust the centralised archiver then it could prove to be convenient, albeit at the introduction of additional risk of corruption.

[1715246320]

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[1715246320]

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[RoguePanda]

Noob questions, but on the topic to SPV wallets. Is there a way of importing an old wallet (from 2009) into Eletrum with a "wallet.dat" file?

Thanks in advance!

[BitcoinSupremo]

In Australia most of our ADSL lines cap out at around 300kbps download - so if you want to download the blockchain then you better start 2 and a half days earlier than you actually want it. I wonder if eventually we will move to a centralised archive of transactions up to a certain date and 'reset' the local blockchain (similar to what happens with a web wallet now). As long as you trust the centralised archiver then it could prove to be convenient, albeit at the introduction of additional risk of corruption.

I am very much surprised with the low amount of download speed from Australia. I have read in news in the internet it is considered a developed country. In my country Italy it is very easy to get an ADSL which downloads with 20 MBPS and we can download the whole blockchain in just one day at the worse.

However if you don't want to download the full blockchain, you can use SPV wallets like electrum or Multibit.
Here are their websites:
www.electrum.org
www.multibit.org

[termion]

I download blockchain bitcoin already 1 month ... I think, blockchain bitcoin will be his gravedigger ... The more people will use it - the longer download and will take up more space on disks

[veleten]

don't be a wuss and take it all
all 40 gigs
you can use lightweight clients like mycellium and save yourself the trouble of downloading and syncing
or you can use web based wallets
core wallets are for the hardcore bitcoin enthusiasts,I don't use core since 2014 and have no remorse.

[zimmah]

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?

I don't think it's necessary at all.

Here is a quote from the original whitepaper:

7. Reclaiming Disk Space
Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under enough blocks, the spent transactions before
it can be discarded to save disk space. To facilitate this without breaking the block's hash,
transactions are hashed in a Merkle Tree [7][2][5], with only the root included in the block's hash.
Old blocks can then be compacted by stubbing off branches of the tree. The interior hashes do
not need to be stored.
A block header with no transactions would be about 80 bytes. If we suppose blocks are
generated every 10 minutes, 80 bytes * 6 * 24 * 365 = 4.2MB per year. With computer systems
typically selling with 2GB of RAM as of 2008, and Moore's Law predicting current growth of
1.2GB per year, storage should not be a problem even if the block headers must be kept in memory

8. Simplified Payment Verification
It is possible to verify payments without running a full network node. A user only needs to keep
a copy of the block headers of the longest proof-of-work chain, which he can get by querying
network nodes until he's convinced he has the longest chain, and obtain the Merkle branch
linking the transaction to the block it's timestamped in. He can't check the transaction for
himself, but by linking it to a place in the chain, he can see that a network node has accepted it,
and blocks added after it further confirm the network has accepted it.
As such, the verification is reliable as long as honest nodes control the network,

I just think this is just being shoved under the carpet because it probably conflicts with the devs idea to keep the 1MB blocksize limit in place.

[zimmah]

don't be a wuss and take it all
all 40 gigs
you can use lightweight clients like mycellium and save yourself the trouble of downloading and syncing
or you can use web based wallets
core wallets are for the hardcore bitcoin enthusiasts,I don't use core since 2014 and have no remorse.

the size is not a problem, but it takes a long time to download because you need to verify every single transaction and that takes a lot of processing power.

Normally I can download 40 gigabyte files in minutes, but downloading and verifying the blockchain takes weeks, if not longer.

[PremiumCodeX]

I think, if you can download 7 years of chain block, you should do it to support the the decentralized system. Do not fall into the trap of collective irresponsibility! Well, if you cannot download that much data, you still could use the client and do transactions or find an alternative, lightweight client. In the long term, we are advised to find a solution for the big data problem in-before bitcoin network starts a centralization pattern.

[Amitabh S]

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?

I don't think it's necessary at all.

Here is a quote from the original whitepaper:

7. Reclaiming Disk Space
Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under enough blocks, the spent transactions before
it can be discarded to save disk space. To facilitate this without breaking the block's hash,
transactions are hashed in a Merkle Tree [7][2][5], with only the root included in the block's hash.
Old blocks can then be compacted by stubbing off branches of the tree. The interior hashes do
not need to be stored.
A block header with no transactions would be about 80 bytes. If we suppose blocks are
generated every 10 minutes, 80 bytes * 6 * 24 * 365 = 4.2MB per year. With computer systems
typically selling with 2GB of RAM as of 2008, and Moore's Law predicting current growth of
1.2GB per year, storage should not be a problem even if the block headers must be kept in memory

8. Simplified Payment Verification
It is possible to verify payments without running a full network node. A user only needs to keep
a copy of the block headers of the longest proof-of-work chain, which he can get by querying
network nodes until he's convinced he has the longest chain, and obtain the Merkle branch
linking the transaction to the block it's timestamped in. He can't check the transaction for
himself, but by linking it to a place in the chain, he can see that a network node has accepted it,
and blocks added after it further confirm the network has accepted it.
As such, the verification is reliable as long as honest nodes control the network,

I just think this is just being shoved under the carpet because it probably conflicts with the devs idea to keep the 1MB blocksize limit in place.

I am assuming you are talking about the first method (in bold). Maybe I missed something in the debate but whats the connection with the block size and storing headers?