What will happen with Bitcoin as the blockchain increases in size over time?

[Abiky]

Something that I'm quite curious to know is that what will happen if Bitcoin's blockchain data keeps increasing in size over the years?

I mean, it will grow up to a point where it would make it less accessible for anyone to setup a full node, as they would need bigger amounts of storage, which implies a higher cost to maintain a node.

So, will there be a solution for this in the future? I was thinking more of like a method to compress blockchain data, to help solve this issue, but don't know if it would be the most viable solution for it.

Nevertheless, I would like to know your opinion about this. 

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[IIOII]

Normal methods of compression are not really feasible, because the data are suitable for it (too much randomness).

Indeed, blockchain size could become a problem in future. Network bandwidth will be exhausted before HDD storage though. Imho all we can do about it is to ensure that block sizes grow slower than network bandwidth and HDD storage. That's why we need solutions like SegWit and LN to expand capacity without increasing blocksizes.

[franky1]

firstly

if anyone shouts doomsdays of 8mb blocks tomorrow and 80mb blocks next year.. SLAP yourself with a reality stick and then go for a walk and see outside your little bubble theory..

now with reality.

20 years ago if i told you that while having a 56k modem and a 3gb hard drive that in the future, it will seem absolutely normal that something 100x your maximum storage capacity will fit on a fingernail. you could not comprehend that.
if i told you that, it will seem absolutely normal that while watching a movie via the internet. your other family members can play a movie quality game with hundreds of others on the internet LIVE. while also recording it and then LIVE uploading it all at the same time. you could not comprehend that.

..
so if 4tb hard drives are the norm now.. expect alot larger in 20 years.

also. lets say we went from
2mb base blocks in 2018 (yea dont have hope for 2017)
4mb base blocks in 2021
8mb base blocks in 2024
16mb base blocks in 2027
32mb base blocks in 2030
64mb base blocks in 2033
128mb base blocks in 2036

128mb=18gb a day.. (thats not huge, considering in 20 years 4K HDTV via cabl will be the norm. where 4minutes of 4KHD is 20gb)

yes 128mb blocks running all day is less bandwidth than watching a true 4K HDTV show for only 4 minutes
yes 128mb blocks is only 6 terrabyte a year.. AGAIN dont comprehend it using todays concept.. think 20 years of technical expansion.. 6tb will be small fry

[bitbob82]

Normal methods of compression are not really feasible, because the data are suitable for it (too much randomness).

Indeed, blockchain size could become a problem in future. Network bandwidth will be exhausted before HDD storage though. Imho all we can do about it is to ensure that block sizes grow slower than network bandwidth and HDD storage. That's why we need solutions like SegWit and LN to expand capacity without increasing blocksizes.

i think its not going to be a big problem, if the blockchain increasing in size and it realize that the bandwidth will create problems then the the bandwidth package should be increase according to the demand and usage.

[franky1]

i think its not going to be a big problem, if the blockchain increasing in size and it realize that the bandwidth will create problems then the the bandwidth package should be increase according to the demand and usage.

i have seen in places like africa, Ukraine, mongolia, russia, brazil, to name just a few 'poor' areas where playing call of duty while livestreaming is not an issue.

i have seen thousands of thousands of people in those countries making youtube video's, facetiming, and doing many bandwidth heavy tasks.
we are not in the dark ages where it takes 2 minutes to load a aol homepage anymore.

internet speeds are not slow. they can however be throttled down by your ISP playing the greedy game of dropping supply to make people pay extra.
if your ISP has no 5 year plan to up its average cap. then start looking for a new ISP.

though its not a need now. ISP's should not be holding its customers to ransom. so you have plenty of years to switch to a different ISP, but in general ISP's should all have a 5 year plan.

even the mobile/cellular networks have a 5 year plan.. 5G will be more then people need in the next 5 years than bitcoin will require in 10 years. meaning no issue.

dont blame bitcoin for your ISP's caps. blame your choice of ISP

[Kakmakr]

i think its not going to be a big problem, if the blockchain increasing in size and it realize that the bandwidth will create problems then the the bandwidth package should be increase according to the demand and usage.

i have seen in places like africa, Ukraine, mongolia, russia, brazil, to name just a few 'poor' areas where playing call of duty while livestreaming is not an issue.

i have seen thousands of thousands of people in those countries making youtube video's, facetiming, and doing many bandwidth heavy tasks.
we are not in the dark ages where it takes 2 minutes to load a aol homepage anymore.

internet speeds are not slow. they can however be throttled down by your ISP playing the greedy game of dropping supply to make people pay extra.
if your ISP has no 5 year plan to up its average cap. then start looking for a new ISP.

though its not a need now. ISP's should not be holding its customers to ransom. so you have plenty of years to switch to a different ISP, but in general ISP's should all have a 5 year plan.

even the mobile/cellular networks have a 5 year plan.. 5G will be more then people need in the next 5 years than bitcoin will require in 10 years. meaning no issue.

dont blame bitcoin for your ISP's caps. blame your choice of ISP

No Franki1, I can tell you, those are more the exception than the rule. I work on contract basis in African countries for a few months every year, and when we are operating from there, we have
bad internet access and the electricity supply is also a problem. We have to run backup generators and UPS's combos 24/4 to keep things going. It is not as straight forward as you are saying,
because the inter-continetal fiber access restrict the amount of internet that can be re-distributed to the public. Bandwidht will be a problem, but I think OP is talking about Disk space.  

[franky1]

No Franki1, I can tell you, those are more the exception than the rule. I work on contract basis in African countries for a few months every year, and when we are operating from there, we have
bad internet access and the electricity supply is also a problem. We have to run backup generators and UPS's combos 24/4 to keep things going. It is not as straight forward as you are saying,
because the inter-continetal fiber access restrict the amount of internet that can be re-distributed to the public. Bandwidht will be a problem, but I think OP is talking about Disk space.  

if you think in a world of online gaming HD broadcasting and facetime calling. that 5400 nodes are even putting a dent into the transcontinental/intercontinental fibre limits.. then you need to get a job on the comedy circuit.

as for africa. i hav done some stuff there in remote places.. and where a solar panel and a RaspbrryPi3 and a 4G 'dongle' is a cheap solution.. africans laugh that technology is not the problem. the transaction fee is

but yea lets address the op's question

in short: bitcoin 'data' does not have a problem
bitcoin data is not a world concern. the transaction fee is
expanding block sizes allows more transactions which allows the fee to not spike/increase so fast thus allowing more people to desire bitcoins utility.
the bloat caused by that growth is of no harm

[valley365]

I guess at some point most wallets should be "light" wallet so they don't need to sync with whole data. It is a pain to sync the full data, even after a week's time. It just takes too long. Sync'ing from scratch is a night mare because of the huge amount of data.

[Jet Cash]

I think a couple of things will happen.

More people will decide to run pruned nodes.

We will see trusted sources of copies of the blockchain for new people who want to set up a full node - you heard it from Kuffy, there is a business oportunity for someone to supply the Bitcoin blockchain on a stick..

[Senor.Bla]

There are not that many options. Making the blockchain smaller is one, but not very realistic. So this leaves us with bigger storage, which depends on the technology, but we can assume from history that this will not be a problem. Bandwidth and transfer limits are more problematic as they depend a lot on the region you life in. The amount of money involved in Bitcoin should be enough so that a solution will be found in time if necessary.

[sakinaka]

This isn't a great problem, I can assure you that. I don't know if you've been in computers and so for a long time, but if yes and that you've gave attention to the releases of the new computer parts, you must have noticed that the computer space has been greatly increasing over the time, and the price declined a lot, following Trip Hawkins' "law". The price of the terabyte will continue to decline, and by 2020 I think that we will be at about 25$ per terabyte (we're at something like 35$ now). So place won't be a problem.
For bandwith to fill up all that storage, I don't think that it will be a problem too, considering that 5G is coming in 2020. I know that's a mobile network, but the common internet network should follow the same way of a very very high speed future.

[Abiky]

Normal methods of compression are not really feasible, because the data are suitable for it (too much randomness).

Indeed, blockchain size could become a problem in future. Network bandwidth will be exhausted before HDD storage though. Imho all we can do about it is to ensure that block sizes grow slower than network bandwidth and HDD storage. That's why we need solutions like SegWit and LN to expand capacity without increasing blocksizes.

Exactly. That is one of the many things that I'm concerned with, because even though storage capacity increases over time, the growth of internet speed takes even longer, resulting in an unbalanced situation of storage and network bandwidth.

However, if network speeds could become improved, then it should be no problem at all for nodes to be able to quickly sync no matter the size of the blockchain. In addition to this, all of this could be worse if blockchain size grows even faster than expected if more users join in the Bitcoin network. 

firstly

if anyone shouts doomsdays of 8mb blocks tomorrow and 80mb blocks next year.. SLAP yourself with a reality stick and then go for a walk and see outside your little bubble theory..

now with reality.

20 years ago if i told you that while having a 56k modem and a 3gb hard drive that in the future, it will seem absolutely normal that something 100x your maximum storage capacity will fit on a fingernail. you could not comprehend that.
if i told you that, it will seem absolutely normal that while watching a movie via the internet. your other family members can play a movie quality game with hundreds of others on the internet LIVE. while also recording it and then LIVE uploading it all at the same time. you could not comprehend that.

..
so if 4tb hard drives are the norm now.. expect alot larger in 20 years.

also. lets say we went from
2mb base blocks in 2018 (yea dont have hope for 2017)
4mb base blocks in 2021
8mb base blocks in 2024
16mb base blocks in 2027
32mb base blocks in 2030
64mb base blocks in 2033
128mb base blocks in 2036

128mb=18gb a day.. (thats not huge, considering in 20 years 4K HDTV via cabl will be the norm. where 4minutes of 4KHD is 20gb)

yes 128mb blocks running all day is less bandwidth than watching a true 4K HDTV show for only 4 minutes
yes 128mb blocks is only 6 terrabyte a year.. AGAIN dont comprehend it using todays concept.. think 20 years of technical expansion.. 6tb will be small fry

Yeah. As storage capacity increases over time, there is still one issue, and it is that the network bandwidth/speeds do not have the same growth rate as storage, thus making it troublesome to sync in less time even though you would have the biggest storage capacity on earth. But, if the growth rate would go on par with storage, then there should be no issue for the blockchain to continue to expand as time goes by.

As long as scalabilty solutions won't affect Bitcoin's decentralization, then everything should be fine. 

[Kprawn]

This isn't a great problem, I can assure you that. I don't know if you've been in computers and so for a long time, but if yes and that you've gave attention to the releases of the new computer parts, you must have noticed that the computer space has been greatly increasing over the time, and the price declined a lot, following Trip Hawkins' "law". The price of the terabyte will continue to decline, and by 2020 I think that we will be at about 25$ per terabyte (we're at something like 35$ now). So place won't be a problem.
For bandwith to fill up all that storage, I don't think that it will be a problem too, considering that 5G is coming in 2020. I know that's a mobile network, but the common internet network should follow the same way of a very very high speed future.

Correct, so far we have seen the data capacity and disk space technologies keeping up with the need, but things change quickly. We have

seen some statistics lately that the demand is much higher than the supply, and the growth cannot keep up with the demand. Have a look at

this : https://www.telegeography.com/research-services/global-bandwidth-research-service/

We might have a problem in the future, but the service providers will manage this with higher fees and capped accounts and also throttling.

[amacar2]

Currently bitcoin blockchain is around 100 GB, anyone can buy 1TB+ worth of Hard disk for $50 and internet packages are also quite cheaper these days and it will be more cheaper in future along with cheaper hard disk/disk space. So i don't think that blockchain size will be bigger issue for the growth of bitcoin in future, however people from underdeveloped countries may struggle to download whole bitcoin blockchain due to very slow internet speed.

Solution for this could be distributing/selling CD or Pendrive with updated blockchain database so that there will be no need to download whole blockchain database to setup new node.

[coinplus]

Mr. Satoshi had mentioned about "Reclaiming Disk Space" in his abstract itself. I am not sure about why it is not already happening as we do see everyday the size of blockchain is keeping on increasing.

Here is the abstract on bitcoin system : https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

In my understanding it has not been implemented yet as cost of storage does get decreased over time.

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

[ebliever]

Do keep in mind that we cannot assume increases in transfer rates and storage capacity and chip speed  will continue as they have in the past. We've already seen a major slowdown over the past 5 years and the die size plateau is drawing ever nearer. This highlights the need for off-chain solutions like LN, even if we don't push for bitcoin to go mainstream.

Google the subject 'End of Moore's Law' for some info on this subject (for example, http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/moores-law-really-is-dead-this-time/). I think there is room yet for secondary refinements and improvements that will give us a few percent more performance here and there, and quantum computing is a big unknown, but we can't count on the old trajectories continuing in the future without a big leap of faith.

[clickerz]

I guess at some point most wallets should be "light" wallet so they don't need to sync with whole data. It is a pain to sync the full data, even after a week's time. It just takes too long. Sync'ing from scratch is a night mare because of the huge amount of data.

That is also a big concern, since data grows significantly also. But I think there is a wallet like electrum  that do not need to download the whole data,but I hope in the near future this can be addressed properly together with transaction speed.

[Abiky]

Mr. Satoshi had mentioned about "Reclaiming Disk Space" in his abstract itself. I am not sure about why it is not already happening as as we do see everyday the size of blockchain is keeping on increasing.

Here is the abstract on bitcoin system : https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

In my understanding it has not been implemented yet as cost of storage does get decreased over time.

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

Interesting fact. As interest and demand grows into Bitcoin, the speed of the blockchain's size growth would be much greater thus making it more difficult for anyone to setup a node due to the fact that storage capacity does not lower as time goes by.

In contrast, if storage can keep up with Moore's law, the we can expect to see no issues when setting up a node as for having the capacity for storing the full blockchain data, as well as be able to sync faster as Internet speeds increase over time.

Nevertheless, I hope that the ever growing blockchain size won't be a major issue towards the decentralization of Bitcoin, rendering it nearly inaccessible for everyday users to setup and run a full node at their homes. Just my opinion. 

[25forsure#]

They will argue and fight for years how to fix like block szie debate now. ha ha

[franky1]

main fake doomsday

"today bitcoins 7 years of world wide borderless transactions of millions of people is huge"
"file storage will need data centres in the next dacade"
"file storage wont grow fast enough to cope"

..
yea todays accumulation of 7 years bitcoin data is the size of........ a fingernail,
grow up and stop crying