Block chain size/storage and slow downloads for new users

[BTC_Superman]

nice explanation. great work. thank you 

[CryptoAmbassador]

Thanks for the update, appreciate it

[DarkBeforeDawn]

If my HD doesn't have 60GB of available space, should I use MultiBit instead of Bitcoin-qt?

[Muhammed Zakir]

If my HD doesn't have 60GB of available space, should I use MultiBit instead of Bitcoin-qt?

If you don't have enough space, it is better to use a thin client, Multibit or Electrum.

[solex]

If my HD doesn't have 60GB of available space, should I use MultiBit instead of Bitcoin-qt?

If you don't have enough space, it is better to use a thin client, Multibit or Electrum.

or

[Meuh6879]

who purchases magnetic hard drive on this ... year ?
SSD 512Go is a commun article on 2015 !

but, i admit that it requires some cooling feature to stay at 164Mo/s ... when magnetic hard drive can transfer at 95Mo/s from the begin to the end of the total capacity without any cooling system.

[ranochigo]

who purchases magnetic hard drive on this ... year ?
SSD 512Go is a commun article on 2015 !

but, i admit that it requires some cooling feature to stay at 164Mo/s ... when magnetic hard drive can transfer at 95Mo/s from the begin to the end of the total capacity without any cooling system.

SSD are still relatively more expensive than normal magnetic hard drives. A HDD consist of a platter and a spinning head. It can be much more slower than SSD which consist of only chips. Those chips are much faster than spinning drives hence the speed.

[Meuh6879]

well, you don't transfer more than 60Go per day to "think" that SSD have constant speed.
it's wrong.

after 9-12Go, SSD speed decrease like hell when you don't have fan behind (temperature restriction).

[ranochigo]

well, you don't transfer more than 60Go per day to "think" that SSD have constant speed.
it's wrong.

after 9-12Go, SSD speed decrease like hell when you don't have fan behind (temperature restriction).

You can't really transfer 60GB per day without having to connect to thousands of nodes and uploading loads of data. For every computer, there should be at least one fan, case fan, CPU fan, PSU fan or GPU fan without them, it would be fried long ago. Do you have any realistic data to prove your point?

[maheshmahi]

Thanks for the update.. Blockchain is really slow hope so multibit works well. Especially for new biess....

[austinsimonson]

Multibit would be my choice.

[maheshmahi]

A great info.
Thanks mike for letting us know about spv mode

[thedictator]

Thanks for the info

[thedictator]

I haven't got blockchain on my pc and I am still bitcoin user.

[danielpbarron]

I haven't got blockchain on my pc and I am still bitcoin user.

Aight but the whole "be your own bank" thing depends on you maintaining your own full node. Otherwise you might as well be using PayPal. It doesn't do much good signing transactions if you don't also have a record of all the other transactions. I mean, centralized services could just as easily implement a "sign a message with a key" option for authorizing account actions. The whole point of bitcoin is keeping track of the public ledger so that nobody can get away with inflating the supply of money or double spending already spent outputs. These are the things that you cannot do, and by my estimation this makes you *not* a bitcoin user.

[evenlydistributingfuture]

Update(s) much appreciated from everyone who has posted.

[TransaDox]

Aight but the whole "be your own bank" thing depends on you maintaining your own full node. Otherwise you might as well be using PayPal. It doesn't do much good signing transactions if you don't also have a record of all the other transactions. I mean, centralized services could just as easily implement a "sign a message with a key" option for authorizing account actions. The whole point of bitcoin is keeping track of the public ledger so that nobody can get away with inflating the supply of money or double spending already spent outputs. These are the things that you cannot do, and by my estimation this makes you *not* a bitcoin user.

+1.

I have come in pretty late to this thread but your post is pretty much my view. Bitcoin is peddled as a decentralised payment system and all the latest decisions seem to be pushing it closer to centralised. The proliferation of web wallets and exchanges means that you don't need a client to *use* bitcoin - just a browser - but you are forced into trusting a 3rd party so you are pretty much back to centralised banks. The block chain is getting so large that most home users are running out of drive space on their netbooks, laptops and phones, and the verification time when you start the software is enormous unless you have a huge SSD. So again we are coming to rely on others to be guardians of the ledger, verify transactions, commit to the ledger and mine new bitcoins. That can all be done by one company!

I don't see this as a good trend. It was originally pitched there were no transaction fees. Well. Now there are and what they are is up to a very small group of people. The protocol should be thinning, IMO, not clumping into resource hungry clusters of services.

[plasterer]

Hi all i did not realise that when i installed bit-coin core that it was going to take so much room, and resources.
I installed it on my laptop, yet i have a tower sitting next to my miners that is doing nothing, also it has alot more Ram and space than this laptop, Bit-coin core has crashed on me yesterday, we bit of a panic as i see no bitcoins in my wallet, but after a little reading up they should show up after it has finished re-indexing the blocks on the disk,  I hope anyway, also hit my first bitcoin after 8 months. Taken a long time for bitcore to catch up.

[abbeytim]

um why are people complaining about blockchain size I mean 1tb drives aren't that expensive

[JarvisTechnology]

This thread only makes me think: Bitcoin is too much. The possibilities it opens, technologies it enables - it's all just too much for businesses and governments and people to grasp easily.
Having said that, it is precisely these kinds of threads that help us digest bits and pieces.

Thanks Mike, retep, and everyone else!

As bitcoins are at early stage,it haven't get popular in the whole world.Such drawbacks becomes an issue for people to purchase or invest in bitcoins.
Such problem arises because of large transactions available in blockchain , those blocks take longer to verify.
If you are on an encrypted filesystem,then consider moving the blockchain and index to a filesystem that isn't encrypted and then symlink to them there.
Overcomming with such problems, a future version (after 0.7) will include LevelDB which should make huge gains as far as performance.
In the meantime, you can always securely download a full set of blockchain data from Sourceforge that is as-of a fairly recent point in time.