Once again, what about the scalability issue?

[Come-from-Beyond]

Blockchain size - 8.14 GB

[Come-from-Beyond]

Blockchain size - 8.14 GB

Wait the blockchain is still growing :O I thought the removing of dust was going to solve all scalability problems I guess Gavin was wrong.

/sarcasm

Removing of dust was done to earn a few years before majority sees that Bitcoin has a lot of scalability issues.

/imho

[nwbitcoin]

This is a non issue - until we get some real big transaction volume and that isn't going to happen for a number of years.

The original white paper mentioned the number of visa transactions in a day as a guide, and the infrastructure of bitcoin allows for it to be managed with no real problems.  However, what isn't being added to the mix is Moore's Law which is also going to help the whole chain be managed without serious pruning.

In general, there is nothing to see here!

[Come-from-Beyond]

This is a non issue - until we get some real big transaction volume and that isn't going to happen for a number of years.

We won't get some real big transaction volume because of this issue.

[Come-from-Beyond]

Blockchain size - 8.3 GB

[DeathAndTaxes]

Blockchain size - 8.3 GB

UXTO ~0.24 GB and growing linearly by about 0.1 GB per year.

Seeing as my workstation has 16GB of RAM and 3TB of storage I will probably need to upgrade my system by the year 2130.  I put it on my google calender.

[mcdett]

We won't get some real big transaction volume because of this issue.

It will just force the economies around the system to change.  Not everyone will be able to maintain a real block chain.  We need to work on trust issues with relying on 3rd parties to verify transactions for us....

this doesn't slow the machine down, just causes change.

[DeathAndTaxes]

We won't get some real big transaction volume because of this issue.

It will just force the economies around the system to change.  Not everyone will be able to maintain a real block chain.  We need to work on trust issues with relying on 3rd parties to verify transactions for us....

this doesn't slow the machine down, just causes change.

WOW so we should just give up and forgot about the core of bitcoin. We should just turn over and die I guess. I see another person that drinks the core dev team juice. The blockchain needs to be reworked to fix a very simple problem with the need for a complex solution.

Satoshi believed from day 1 that not every user would maintain a full node.  That is why his paper includes a section on SPV.  Decentralized doesn't have to mean every single human on the planet is an equal peer in a network covering all transactions for the human race.   tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of nodes in a network used by millions or tens of millions provides sufficient decentralization that attacks to limit or exploit the network becomes infeasible.

[gweedo]

We won't get some real big transaction volume because of this issue.

It will just force the economies around the system to change.  Not everyone will be able to maintain a real block chain.  We need to work on trust issues with relying on 3rd parties to verify transactions for us....

this doesn't slow the machine down, just causes change.

WOW so we should just give up and forgot about the core of bitcoin. We should just turn over and die I guess. I see another person that drinks the core dev team juice. The blockchain needs to be reworked to fix a very simple problem with the need for a complex solution.

Satoshi believed from day 1 that not every user would maintain a full node.  That is why his paper includes a section on SPV.

Their a huge difference between a 3rd party server and SPV clients. Yes one day, when it takes 100's of GBs and their is no more optimizations that can be done.

[DeathAndTaxes]

What 3rd party server.  I run my own node and will be able to for at least a century at this rate in blockchain growth.

[calian]

Are any miners considering allowing people to sweep their 0.00000001 amounts to addresses with larger amounts fee-free? Though I guess if there's only 100 MB of addresses with positive balances no one might care.

[Come-from-Beyond]

Yesterday I spent a whole hour downloading blocks for last 4 weeks. Not very convenient! Seems my 1 TB drive didn't help much.

What am I doing wrong?

[Cyberdyne]

Yesterday I spent a whole hour downloading blocks for last 4 weeks. Not very convenient! Seems my 1 TB drive didn't help much.

What am I doing wrong?

Leaving it offline too long?

[Come-from-Beyond]

Leaving it offline too long?

Aye, I'm a non-hardcore casual bitcoiner. But that was an example of an issue related to slow downloading/uploading speed. Freshly mined blocks can't be pruned.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Leaving it offline too long?

Aye, I'm a non-hardcore casual bitcoiner. But that was an example of an issue related to slow downloading/uploading speed. Freshly mined blocks can't be pruned.

If you are a casual user unable to keep the client online why not just use a SPV client.  You aren't contributing to the decentralization of the network if your node has an uptime of ~3%.

[Syke]

The blockchain on my phone is 1.06 MB. I think the blockchain is just fine in size.

[Killdozer]

People, stop saying that scalability is not a problem and writing about how cheap hard drives are.
The scalability is the number one problem stopping Bitcoin from becoming mainstream.
It doesn't matter how fast the drives are growing, right now the blockchain keeps all the old information which is not even needed, and grows indefinitely, how hard is it to understand that it is a non-scalable non-future-friendly scheme?
I am sure the devs know this and are doing their best to address it and I am grateful for that. But saying that it's not a problem is just ignorant and stupid.

We won't get some real big transaction volume because of this issue.

I can't see how anybody is even arguing against this. I mean, it's even in the wiki: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

[Anon136]

Once again, people are working on scalability. Donate if you really care about the problem and want to help:

http://utxo.tumblr.com/

so is the idea here to just to expand the max block size for miners when ever we hit a wall and make it so that non-mining nodes dont need that level of bandwidth to audit transactions?

sorry i have put a lot of work into understanding bitcoin in the abstract but im not computer scientist. a lot of the technical minutia goes over my head, especially with proposed alterations to bitcoin when all my effort has been put towards understanding bitcoin as it stands.

[DeathAndTaxes]

People, stop saying that scalability is not a problem and writing about how cheap hard drives are.
The scalability is the number one problem stopping Bitcoin from becoming mainstream.
It doesn't matter how fast the drives are growing, right now the blockchain keeps all the old information which is not even needed, and grows indefinitely, how hard is it to understand that it is a non-scalable non-future-friendly scheme?
I am sure the devs know this and are doing their best to address it and I am grateful for that. But saying that it's not a problem is just ignorant and stupid.

We won't get some real big transaction volume because of this issue.

I can't see how anybody is even arguing against this. I mean, it's even in the wiki: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

The historical storage is a non-issue and the scalability page points that out.  Bandwidth (for CURRENT blocks) presents a much harder bottleneck to extreme transaction levels and after bandwidth comes memory as fast validation requires the UXTO to be cached in memory.  Thankfully dust rules will constrain the growth of the UXTO however both bandwidth and memory will be an issue much sooner and quicker than the storing the blockchain on disk. 

The the idea that today's transaction volume is held back because of the "massive" blockchain isn't supported by the facts.  Even the 1MB block limit provides for 7 tps and the current network isn't even 0.5 tps sustained.  We could see a 1,300% increase in transaction volume before even the 1MB limit became an issue.  At 1 MB per block the blockchain would grow by 50 GB per year.  It would take 20 years of maxed out 1MB blocks before the blockchain couldn't fit on an "ancient" (in the year 2033) 1TB drive.  

Beyond 1MB the storage requirements will grow but they will run up against memory and bandwidth long before disk space becomes too expensive.  Still as pointed out eventually most nodes will not maintain a copy of the full blockchain, that will be a task reserved for "archive nodes" and instead will just retain the block headers (which is ~4MB per year) and a deep enough section of the the recent blockchain.

[Anon136]

People, stop saying that scalability is not a problem and writing about how cheap hard drives are.
The scalability is the number one problem stopping Bitcoin from becoming mainstream.
It doesn't matter how fast the drives are growing, right now the blockchain keeps all the old information which is not even needed, and grows indefinitely, how hard is it to understand that it is a non-scalable non-future-friendly scheme?
I am sure the devs know this and are doing their best to address it and I am grateful for that. But saying that it's not a problem is just ignorant and stupid.

We won't get some real big transaction volume because of this issue.

I can't see how anybody is even arguing against this. I mean, it's even in the wiki: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

The historical storage is a non-issue and the scalability page points that out.  Bandwidth (for CURRENT blocks) presents a much harder bottleneck to extreme transaction levels and after bandwidth comes memory as fast validation requires the UXTO to be cached in memory.  Thankfully dust rules will constrain the growth of the UXTO however both bandwidth and memory will be an issue much sooner and quicker than the storing the blockchain on disk. 

The the idea that today's transaction volume is held back because of the "massive" blockchain isn't supported by the facts.  Even the 1MB block limit provides for 7 tps and the current network isn't even 0.5 tps sustained.  We could see a 1,300% increase in transaction volume before even the 1MB limit became an issue.  At 1 MB per block the blockchain would grow by 50 GB per year.  It would take 20 years of maxed out 1MB blocks before the blockchain couldn't fit on an "ancient" (in the year 2033) 1TB drive.  

Beyond 1MB the storage requirements will grow but they will run up against memory and bandwidth long before disk space becomes too expensive.  Still as pointed out eventually most nodes will not maintain a copy of the full blockchain, that will be a task reserved for "archive nodes" and instead will just retain the block headers (which is ~4MB per year) and a deep enough section of the the recent blockchain.

so as far as addressing the bandwidth bottleneck problem you are in the off chain transaction camp correct?