Block chain size/storage and slow downloads for new users

[Bernie87]

If demand is sufficient, a better solution would be flash memory/usb flash drive(s) sold with the initial blockchain already written on them

That would defeat the purpose of bitcoin. What good is a blockchain that you didn't receive from the network through the lengthy process of consensus verification? You might as well just use a thin client.

That would defeat absolutely nothing. Once thoroughly verified, old versions of the blockchain NEVER change, so that would be very stupid to insist that the only way to get the whole blockchain is to download it all through slow network connections and very slow servers, knowing also that the blockchain tends to grow faster with time; what a stupid waste of network bandwidth and time! Yes, one can of course use a thin client instead but that was not the point of my post.

[danielpbarron]

If demand is sufficient, a better solution would be flash memory/usb flash drive(s) sold with the initial blockchain already written on them

That would defeat the purpose of bitcoin. What good is a blockchain that you didn't receive from the network through the lengthy process of consensus verification? You might as well just use a thin client.

That would defeat absolutely nothing. Once thoroughly verified, old versions of the blockchain NEVER change, so that would be very stupid to insist that the only way to get the whole blockchain is to download it all through slow network connections and very slow servers, knowing also that the blockchain tends to grow faster with time; what a stupid waste of network bandwidth and time! Yes, one can of course use a thin client instead but that was not the point of my post.

False. When you download it the usual way, you get it from many different sources. When you get one pre-verified chunk, you get it from one source. If that one source is your own full node, then no problem. If that source is some stranger on the internet, you have a big problem. Maybe at this stage in the game it isn't an issue. But these are certainly the considerations to make if you see bitcoin having any sort of future.

[crazyearner]

Block chain download needs to be shrunk down and only have say at least 1 years of active transactions and then to be archived into another system where your wallet can access it by typing a command in and then calling to download archived transactions this way it would reduce the active size of the chain as it does not need to have such a large amount of data to download 20Gb and counting how many people wanting to download that on to their system. I dont think many like this and why they use places liek blockchain.info but poses more of a risk that way online wallet.

[lemay697]

yes very interesting stuff. . Thanks for the info

[danielpbarron]

Block chain download needs to be shrunk down and only have say at least 1 years of active transactions and then to be archived into another system where your wallet can access it by typing a command in and then calling to download archived transactions this way it would reduce the active size of the chain as it does not need to have such a large amount of data to download 20Gb and counting how many people wanting to download that on to their system. I dont think many like this and why they use places liek blockchain.info but poses more of a risk that way online wallet.

It's a little more than 20 gigs.

Code:

$ du -h .bitcoin/                                                                                                             
14.4M   .bitcoin/database
39.1G   .bitcoin/

If this is too much, bitcoin speculation isn't for you. In the hypothetical future you have described, the poor people will just have to get bitcoin checking accounts or something; we're not compromising the network so that they can have easy blockchain access.

[zvs]

Block chain download needs to be shrunk down and only have say at least 1 years of active transactions and then to be archived into another system where your wallet can access it by typing a command in and then calling to download archived transactions this way it would reduce the active size of the chain as it does not need to have such a large amount of data to download 20Gb and counting how many people wanting to download that on to their system. I dont think many like this and why they use places liek blockchain.info but poses more of a risk that way online wallet.

Hmm, it's more like 35GB (aha! just read above, oops)

I purchased my first 100GB + HDD probably a decade or more ago?

Bandwidth, well, I guess it depends on your location, but generally all these cable and DSL providers are all about downstream and give jack shit for upstream, at least in the US.

[ranochigo]

Block chain download needs to be shrunk down and only have say at least 1 years of active transactions and then to be archived into another system where your wallet can access it by typing a command in and then calling to download archived transactions this way it would reduce the active size of the chain as it does not need to have such a large amount of data to download 20Gb and counting how many people wanting to download that on to their system. I dont think many like this and why they use places liek blockchain.info but poses more of a risk that way online wallet.

Hmm, it's more like 35GB (aha! just read above, oops)

I purchased my first 100GB + HDD probably a decade or more ago?

Bandwidth, well, I guess it depends on your location, but generally all these cable and DSL providers are all about downstream and give jack shit for upstream, at least in the US.

Blockchain download would only use download bandwidth, correct me if I'm wrong. It will use upload speed only if you set it to relay transactions and block.

[crazyearner]

I do not mind it but when you have to look at setting up a separate HDD for it is not good. I do like BTC but when it comes to such amounts of space a lot of people in 3rd worlds will not use it simply because of the data and amount that is needed to be downloaded and then continue to download small amounts. Moved over to block chain and paper wallets for now till at least this gets reduced in size. even android wallets dont use up this amount of space nor do other btc wallets.

[danielpbarron]

I do not mind it but when you have to look at setting up a separate HDD for it is not good. I do like BTC but when it comes to such amounts of space a lot of people in 3rd worlds will not use it simply because of the data and amount that is needed to be downloaded and then continue to download small amounts. Moved over to block chain and paper wallets for now till at least this gets reduced in size. even android wallets dont use up this amount of space nor do other btc wallets.

It doesn't really matter what you like, and this point about 3rd world people has been refuted. I snipped out the relevant bit, but you would be well advised to read the rest of the post.

V. The fork is needed because otherwise some people won't be able to use Bitcoin.

Bitcoin isn't for everybody. Creating something useful that everyone can use is an exercise in trying to create something that's useful but worthless. Such a thing may exist, in the sense perpetuum mobile may exist. As far as the science of physics goes, they do not.

Should blocks ever become full, older coinbases will be prioritized over newer coinbases, and larger mining fees and transactions prioritized over smaller mining fees and smaller transactions. This means that someone who wishes to pay for very little with Bitcoin will be forced to use something else, so to speak is forced to "give his seat" to someone richer. This is exactly the point and the intent of Bitcoin : to force the poor to yield to the rich, unversally, as a matter of course.

You may not like this, but that is entirely an emotional problem of yours, which you're welcome to resolve any way you can : stop being poor, take a lot of pills, whatever. You may try to solve it by attempting to make it impossible for the rich to construct tools that they will then use to force you to yield to them, but this will necessarily not work : being rich means by definition they have more resources than you, and whatever you devise they can make a counter.

If you are more practically inclined, and having understood, accepted and come to terms with your fundamental human inferiority as it flows from your poverty, some solutions to your predicament of "I wish to buy myself a basket" have already been discussed :

For the reasons noted and for many other reasons I am pretty much satisfied that Bitcoin is not nor will it ever be a direct means of payment for retail anything. You may end up paying for a month's worth of coffee vouchers at your favourite coffee shop via Bitcoin (so shop scrip built on top of Bitcoin), you may end up settling your accounts monthly at the restaurant in Bitcoin (so store credit built on top of Bitcoin), you will probably cash into whatever local currency from Bitcoin (be it Unified Standard Dubaloos or Universally Simplified Dosidoes or whatever else) but all that is entirely different a story.

Run along now, back to playing in the mud with the other naked kids in your village. Bitcoin's just not for your kind.

[Borisz]

--snip--
Bandwidth, well, I guess it depends on your location, but generally all these cable and DSL providers are all about downstream and give jack shit for upstream, at least in the US.

It's the same in the EU and I think probably in the rest of the world too. I think they do this to prevent you from running a server from home for cheap.

I do not mind it but when you have to look at setting up a separate HDD for it is not good. I do like BTC but when it comes to such amounts of space a lot of people in 3rd worlds will not use it simply because of the data and amount that is needed to be downloaded and then continue to download small amounts. Moved over to block chain and paper wallets for now till at least this gets reduced in size. even android wallets dont use up this amount of space nor do other btc wallets.

Agree. Many people simply can't afford so much storage space. 30 something GB is simply a lot.
Oldish laptops with 80 GB of HDD have a hard time with the blockchain maybe even impossible if you want to use it or anything else like web browsing, for which it would be perfectly capable. Even more, I had a laptop with 250 GB and I was fighting with Bitcoin for every last bit of space on the HDD (OS, work software, work data etc +bitcoin).

[fsb4000]

--snip--
Bandwidth, well, I guess it depends on your location, but generally all these cable and DSL providers are all about downstream and give jack shit for upstream, at least in the US.

It's the same in the EU and I think probably in the rest of the world too. I think they do this to prevent you from running a server from home for cheap.

Nope.
I do not know what you consider at a low speed, but here ,in Russia, I pay 450 rubles($7.44 or €6.87)(per month) for 50 Mbit/s upstream and 50 Mbit/s downstream.

[Meuh6879]

... i want this ...

[Meuh6879]

Agree. Many people simply can't afford so much storage space. 30 something GB is simply a lot.
Oldish laptops with 80 GB of HDD have a hard time with the blockchain maybe even impossible.

I have an old PC for bitcoin (and others P2P tools ...)
but if you have SATA ... you can buy a cheap 1To drive ... or a cheap 256Go SSD now.

not the point.

[Borisz]

--snip--
Bandwidth, well, I guess it depends on your location, but generally all these cable and DSL providers are all about downstream and give jack shit for upstream, at least in the US.

It's the same in the EU and I think probably in the rest of the world too. I think they do this to prevent you from running a server from home for cheap.

Nope.
I do not know what you consider at a low speed, but here ,in Russia, I pay 450 rubles($7.44 or €6.87)(per month) for 50 Mbit/s upstream and 50 Mbit/s downstream.

Good to know then! Thanks for the info.
In countries I have lived so far the upload was always a 10th of the download speed.

[ranochigo]

--snip--
Bandwidth, well, I guess it depends on your location, but generally all these cable and DSL providers are all about downstream and give jack shit for upstream, at least in the US.

It's the same in the EU and I think probably in the rest of the world too. I think they do this to prevent you from running a server from home for cheap.

Nope.
I do not know what you consider at a low speed, but here ,in Russia, I pay 450 rubles($7.44 or €6.87)(per month) for 50 Mbit/s upstream and 50 Mbit/s downstream.

Good to know then! Thanks for the info.
In countries I have lived so far the upload was always a 10th of the download speed.

That's bad, in Singapore, upload was always higher than download no matter how I test it and the speed is always at or above the promised speed by my ISP(300mbps)

[Borisz]

--snip--
Bandwidth, well, I guess it depends on your location, but generally all these cable and DSL providers are all about downstream and give jack shit for upstream, at least in the US.

It's the same in the EU and I think probably in the rest of the world too. I think they do this to prevent you from running a server from home for cheap.

Nope.
I do not know what you consider at a low speed, but here ,in Russia, I pay 450 rubles($7.44 or €6.87)(per month) for 50 Mbit/s upstream and 50 Mbit/s downstream.

Good to know then! Thanks for the info.
In countries I have lived so far the upload was always a 10th of the download speed.

That's bad, in Singapore, upload was always higher than download no matter how I test it and the speed is always at or above the promised speed by my ISP(300mbps)

I seriously have never seen/heard of this. But its cool. 300 mbps, is awesome. The highest I had was 50 mbps and that was for 30 GBP a month! Upload was around 10.

[CoinCidental]

--snip--
Bandwidth, well, I guess it depends on your location, but generally all these cable and DSL providers are all about downstream and give jack shit for upstream, at least in the US.

It's the same in the EU and I think probably in the rest of the world too. I think they do this to prevent you from running a server from home for cheap.

Nope.
I do not know what you consider at a low speed, but here ,in Russia, I pay 450 rubles($7.44 or €6.87)(per month) for 50 Mbit/s upstream and 50 Mbit/s downstream.

in sweden most people have more
the average is 56-57MB   but many people have 100MB/s  package

[cheatwomen]

Thank you very much!

[dinofelis]

I'm wondering, if we see bitcoin, or just any cryptocurrency based upon the blockchain principle, large, whether the volume of the chain is not going to be problematic.

If we look at companies such as Visa, they processes several thousands of transactions per second.  Now let us assume that the minimum amount of data for a transaction is 100 bytes (send and receive address, and amount and some data) in a transaction-optimised set of cryptocurrencies.  Let us assume that 1000 transactions per second happen.  That means 100 KB per second on the block chain.  That is a data flux that is still reasonable to keep up with, but when accumulated, it is huge.  It is more than 8 GB per day.  The block chains of the cryptocurrencies taking these transactions would grow at a pace of 8 GB a day, which means 3.2 TB a year.

Of course, the burden can be distributed over different cryptos.  You only need to look at the block chain of the crypto you're interested in.  If there would be a few tens of cryptos around, sharing the burden, each chain would only grow with a few hundred GB a year.  But still.  These are big volumes, even in the future.

[danielpbarron]

I'm wondering, if we see bitcoin, or just any cryptocurrency based upon the blockchain principle, large, whether the volume of the chain is not going to be problematic.

If we look at companies such as Visa

Bitcoin doesn't need to compete with Visa. Visa isn't a censorship and counterfeit resistant, perfectly fungible, sounder than gold currency. Visa is a payment processor, and if it wants to remain relevant in the coming decades, it will have to start offering bitcoin denominated lines of credit.

You might want to give this post a read:

IX. "Hard fork block size politics: do we want decentralized digital gold, or just another Visa? We want both. And there's no reason we can't have both."

Actually, there's a damned good reason "we" can't have both : one of them is nonsense. To grok this, tell me, whom do you know in Mali ?

No, not Bali, that island where preppy sluts go for spring break. Mali, the funny-shaped, landlocked West African nation.

Nobody ? Never even heard of anyone from there, never ate in a Mali restaurant, never bought a Mali anything over the mail, as far as you're concerned Mali could just as well not exist at all ? Well, bless you, the sentiment's exactly mutual! As far as they're concerned, the entire population of Mali couldn't give less of a fuck, and you might as well not exist.

Yet your proposal here is that we take everything of everyone : each pair of underwear, each box of notebooks left over from highschool, each car and set of car keys, each coffee mug, each old printer cartridge, each and every single item of everyone, worldwide, and dump them all into a huge warehouse in San Francisco. And then, you say, you'll give everyone receipts to keep track of their stuff. Obviously the receipts will be rather lengthy and complicated an affair, but all the inconvenience, confusion and sheer effort is worth it, you say. Because why ? "Because there's no reason we can't have both". Orly.

I get it, you're a centralist at heart, you want this globalisation thing where everyone's stuff is locked up in Fort Knox so the misfortunate indigents of Mali get to curse the day your pasty ass showed up forcing "democracy" on them. I don't particularly like this outlook, but who am I to tell you how to live your life.

Nevertheless, there's a damned good reason why you can't have both at my expense. You can't ask demand me and my friends and my business partners run complicated, expensive and ultimately pointless computer systems that are required to distinguish our transactions from Mali bound transactions, avoid double spends and all of that simply because you want the world to be a centrally-planned, single-core thing because you're too intellectually lazy and too mentally simple to accomodate the actual variety of the world in your barren skull. I get it, it'd be much simpler for you to think of "everything in Bitcoin".

This simplicity for you has actual costs in the world. If large classes of transactions among which there is no possible cross-ambiguity remain limited to their own context, there's less hassle for everyone involved. Imagine the common occurence of someone sitting in your seat on the airplane. Fortunately, the tickets carry a seat number, which can be compared, and there you go. Imagine instead the Gavinairport where Gavintickets require everyone in the whole airport get out of their planes, single file to the tickets checking office, and have their tickets checked. Every single time someone sits in someone else's seat. And what'd the TSA say to this ? I can almost see them, "there's no reason we can't have it". Of course there isn't, if nobody gives a shit about people or their legitimate interests.

There's no benefit to making everything wait on everything else if large swaths can be readily isolated that'd absolutely never meet. If my blockchain doesn't have to wait for Mali blocks to propagate, and if it doesn't have to to check against Mali doublespends of transactions nobody in Mali could ever be conceivably involved in under any circumstances, then my blockchain is easier to run, to maintain, to debug and so it can provide for the citizens of Mali exactly the only thing they actually want me to provide : a backup value.

They don't perceivably want nor do they conceivably need main chain transactions for every single quarter of cent / West African CFA franc transaction they undertake. What they clearly need and possibly even want is the ability to turn a pile of however many of these they've saved into a few Satoshi. So they can save that, so they can buy Trilema credits, so they can do the few and precious things where they actually interact with the world at large. There's absolutely no need to make every single move they take dependent on the actions of far removed parties that couldn't care less about their interests, needs or proclivities.

Yeah, yeah, you're thinking "but Bitcoin is decentralized". Sure, it's a decentralized implementation. But it is an implementation of a centralized concept. Bitcoin is universal money, and that's quite by definition central. Even if implemented in a decentralized manner, as all usable money always has to be implemented, it nevertheless is a centralized thing, by the very nature of what money has to be in order to be money. Now why marry to this an obligation that's burdensome on everyone and not really useful to anyone ?