Bitcoin addon: Distributed block chain storage

[lucif]

Cross post

2. Your 'ultimate storage' grows with more users, but so does the amount of spam produced. It would solve nothing. I like many others would still prefer to store the entire chain.

You answered this by own in 4. 1000s HDD are anyway better than one.

4. Pruning, would remove all spent transactions that are 2(?) transactions back since they wouldnt be needed, dramatically reducing the size of the blockchain. At which point your solution is entirely moot since anyone could store whats left of it without issue.

This is good solution, but this breaks chain integrity. And who said spent outputs will not be needed by anyone?

5. Storage devices are getting cheaper and larger every day and so is memory. im sure if it were needed at some point in the future someone could build a custom board with a crazy amount of memory on it to store the UTXO set. With the speed memory runs at im sure someone could make a slower, cheaper, larger ramdisks for this purpose.

Everybody blindly repeat this following satoshi. But satoshi said this regarding storage space capacity. HDD also have one more very important property which nobody takes into account: IO capacity. Soon, bitcoind will run out of IO capacity of spinning HDD, and later, solid state drives.

I don't propose to discard whole local chain. I propose don't dig it without need on local side.

I know at least one use case where my solution will bring performance benefits.

I know that DHT storage just moves load from disk IO to network IO. But just realize, we have a new block with thousands transactions.

With regular client, EACH NETWORK NODE will have to dig into own local chain and do a key lookup there for each transaction. Thousands or millions of nodes will have to do same hard IO work on each new block.

With regular client + DHT enabled - only few will do this. They will cache lookup results into local DHT cache and answer to others from there. So in this case, only few nodes will perform local chain lookup. Lookup results will distribute along network in mostly cached answers.

As bonus, there will be google-large peta-scale storage for all chain with its glory.a

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[pent]

DHT probably will let us go by google way.

Google always planned to never put major load on single node (as bitcoind doing now). This sounds like "Stay away from single expensive main frames. No one of them will never handle load of our tasks. Use many cheap and distributed nodes.". This how BigTable born. In other way, they would stuck in bottlenecks.

[pent]

The main point of DHT implementation is to let run client with full chain even on cheap computers.

As long as you put major load on single node, the hardware requirements for that node grow along with chain. This may bring a situation when only jet set can run full chain. All others will have to blindly beleive to their chain.

This is centralization IMO.

[bluemeanie1]

The main point of DHT implementation is to let run client with full chain even on cheap computers.

As long as you put major load on single node, the hardware requirements for that node grow along with chain. This may bring a situation when only jet set can run full chain. All others will have to blindly beleive to their chain.

This is centralization IMO.

that's inevitable.  The block chain is currently > 8 GB.  I think things are going to move to an architecture where there a limited set of nodes in the network manage the currency, and most account owners are light clients of some kind.  It's simply not practical to have everyone have a block chain.  These distributed currencies are just getting started and Bitcoin is already unmanageable.

My vision is 1) no more proof of work 2) distributed rather than decentralized currencies.  This offers a lot of advantages.

[molecular]

The problem is basically how to optimize the Distributed Hash Table algorithm for block storage.

Already solved by the Freenet project:

https://freenetproject.org

excuse me?

maybe contact xelister and/or da2ce7. They have been working on "bitcoin over freenet" 2 years ago.

[gmaxwell]

I think things are going to move to an architecture where there a limited set of nodes in the network manage the currency, and most account owners are light clients of some kind.

If you want this then the Bitcoin block-chain and protocol is the wrong design to achieve it. Services like visa paypal are far better designed for serving many transactions from small clusters. More secure too— once you must trust a limited set of nodes to not cheat then protocols which cannot be compromised unless they do offer a better security model.

[bluemeanie1]

I think things are going to move to an architecture where there a limited set of nodes in the network manage the currency, and most account owners are light clients of some kind.

If you want this then the Bitcoin block-chain and protocol is the wrong design to achieve it. Services like visa paypal are far better designed for serving many transactions from small clusters. More secure too— once you must trust a limited set of nodes to not cheat then protocols which cannot be compromised unless they do offer a better security model.

A fairly pointless comment.

Visa doesn't have any nodes.  You can participate in the authorization process in a Visa transaction?