blockchain storage requirements

[pontiacg5]

You're right. I researched difficulty and found it can go down too. Depends on how long it takes for new bitcoins to appear. Bitcoin1 looked like a failure for a while (and may fail again...China knocked the wind out of it...and a vulnerability may be found eventually...worse than Sires/Cornell). Bitcoin2, being just a theoretical clone of Bitcoin1 would still have all the advantages of Bitcoin1 along with easier mining in the short term.

No,

The difficulty only goes down if the network hashrate goes down. Bitcoin never looked like a failure, china knocked no wind out of anything, and if any vulnerability in bitcoin is ever found it will be patched. Afterwards it will continue to be called "bitcoin," never bitcoin2, bitcoin 1.0, etc. The network, and thus difficulty, will likely go on without change.  

This has happened in the past, and it will likely happen again in the future. Bitcoin is still here, doing just fine and it's still called bitcoin. You could go mine one of those old forks if you wanted, and what you would be mining is an ALTcoin since is not the majority bitcoin chain.

[Gabi]

Please note that "difficulty" is not a bad thing like your posts are implying. "mining coins" is just a temporary thing to put bitcoins in circulation, mining is there for security purpose. The higher the difficulty=the higher the security wich is a GOOD thing.

[zatoichi]

Difficulty is a double edged sword. On the one hand it protects bitcoin holders (hopefully). But it slows down miners. I don't think you'd find one miner who wouldn't want a lower difficulty level than other miners.

BTW I'm still trying to find out how many nodes there are (if you know). Isn't there a count somewhere?

[theBishop]

Doesnt blockchain get bigger with messages people enter? I thought that.  So if people add messages with every transaction will grow more rapid that if didnt.  Could be wrong though.

[nazgul104]

Wouldn't the block size depend on how many transactions were in it when it was successfully mined? ie., you keep on adding transactions to it and as and when the hash generated is below the target hash, then this block is said to have been successfully created and a new block will start? So, determining the avg.size of the block based on the existing blocks would not provide a accurate number (or close to it) is what I think.

I'm a newbie here, so pls. correct me if my understanding is wrong.

[zatoichi]

I looked at:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transactions

and didn't see an obvious text message field. Actually that might be neat though. Send the smallest transferable amount to a huge list of addresses with a commercial message. Voila. Bitcoin spam!

[pontiacg5]

Difficulty is a double edged sword. On the one hand it protects bitcoin holders (hopefully). But it slows down miners. I don't think you'd find one miner who wouldn't want a lower difficulty level than other miners.

BTW I'm still trying to find out how many nodes there are (if you know). Isn't there a count somewhere?

What? It is supposed to slow down miners, that is exactly the point of the difficulty. While you may be a greedy bastard wanting to mine at a lower difficulty than everyone else, the rest of us know that would break bitcoin, in that case whatever you managed to mine would be worthless, so enjoy.

There is no count on the nodes, they come and go as they please. A node is a lot like a bittorrent client, some are well established and never move. Others only run when necessary and don't do much else. Why do you want a count anyway? What would that tell you?

Doesnt blockchain get bigger with messages that people can enter? I thought that.  So if people add messages with every transaction it will grow more rapid that if they didnt.  Could be wrong though.

You may have seen the messages on blockchain.info, but that is not on the bitcoin blockchain at all. I think there may have been a way to add text to a transaction, but I don't think it was ever used/enabled. It still is possible to send "messages" in the blockchain, but that's more complicated than I can explain.

Wouldn't the block size depend on how many transactions were in it when it was successfully mined? ie., you keep on adding transactions to it and as and when the hash generated is below the target hash, then this block is said to have been successfully created and a new block will start? So, determining the avg.size of the block based on the existing blocks would not provide a accurate number (or close to it) is what I think.

I'm a newbie here, so pls. correct me if my understanding is wrong.

You are exactly right. There's nothing stopping a node from mining blocks with no transactions at all, as well.

[nazgul104]

You are exactly right. There's nothing stopping a node from mining blocks with no transactions at all, as well.

Good to know that I got some things right. 
But I was not aware that the block can have only the newly generated coins alone as its transaction and still be valid. Thanks for clarifying that pontiacg5. Anyways, I digressed from OP's original post. No more questions from me..

[zengryT]

I looked at:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transactions

and didn't see an obvious text message field. Actually that might be neat though. Send the smallest transferable amount to a huge list of addresses with a commercial message. Voila. Bitcoin spam!

To spam Bitcoin blockchain, you have to pay fee - every 1000 bytes = 0.0001 BTC
Not a cheap spam...

[theBishop]

Difficulty is a double edged sword. On the one hand it protects bitcoin holders (hopefully). But it slows down miners. I don't think you'd find one miner who wouldn't want a lower difficulty level than other miners.

BTW I'm still trying to find out how many nodes there are (if you know). Isn't there a count somewhere?

What? It is supposed to slow down miners, that is exactly the point of the difficulty. While you may be a greedy bastard wanting to mine at a lower difficulty than everyone else, the rest of us know that would break bitcoin, in that case whatever you managed to mine would be worthless, so enjoy.

There is no count on the nodes, they come and go as they please. A node is a lot like a bittorrent client, some are well established and never move. Others only run when necessary and don't do much else. Why do you want a count anyway? What would that tell you?

Doesnt blockchain get bigger with messages that people can enter? I thought that.  So if people add messages with every transaction it will grow more rapid that if they didnt.  Could be wrong though.

You may have seen the messages on blockchain.info, but that is not on the bitcoin blockchain at all. I think there may have been a way to add text to a transaction, but I don't think it was ever used/enabled. It still is possible to send "messages" in the blockchain, but that's more complicated than I can explain.

Wouldn't the block size depend on how many transactions were in it when it was successfully mined? ie., you keep on adding transactions to it and as and when the hash generated is below the target hash, then this block is said to have been successfully created and a new block will start? So, determining the avg.size of the block based on the existing blocks would not provide a accurate number (or close to it) is what I think.

I'm a newbie here, so pls. correct me if my understanding is wrong.

You are exactly right. There's nothing stopping a node from mining blocks with no transactions at all, as well.

What about signing message? Is that same thing or doesnt add to blockchain?

[pontiacg5]

Difficulty is a double edged sword. On the one hand it protects bitcoin holders (hopefully). But it slows down miners. I don't think you'd find one miner who wouldn't want a lower difficulty level than other miners.

BTW I'm still trying to find out how many nodes there are (if you know). Isn't there a count somewhere?

What? It is supposed to slow down miners, that is exactly the point of the difficulty. While you may be a greedy bastard wanting to mine at a lower difficulty than everyone else, the rest of us know that would break bitcoin, in that case whatever you managed to mine would be worthless, so enjoy.

There is no count on the nodes, they come and go as they please. A node is a lot like a bittorrent client, some are well established and never move. Others only run when necessary and don't do much else. Why do you want a count anyway? What would that tell you?

Doesnt blockchain get bigger with messages that people can enter? I thought that.  So if people add messages with every transaction it will grow more rapid that if they didnt.  Could be wrong though.

You may have seen the messages on blockchain.info, but that is not on the bitcoin blockchain at all. I think there may have been a way to add text to a transaction, but I don't think it was ever used/enabled. It still is possible to send "messages" in the blockchain, but that's more complicated than I can explain.

Wouldn't the block size depend on how many transactions were in it when it was successfully mined? ie., you keep on adding transactions to it and as and when the hash generated is below the target hash, then this block is said to have been successfully created and a new block will start? So, determining the avg.size of the block based on the existing blocks would not provide a accurate number (or close to it) is what I think.

I'm a newbie here, so pls. correct me if my understanding is wrong.

You are exactly right. There's nothing stopping a node from mining blocks with no transactions at all, as well.

What about signing message? Is that same thing or doesnt add to blockchain?

No, signing a message just uses the public and private key pair from a bitcoin transaction to verify ownership of the private key, without revealing it. The blockchain is used as reference only, no information is added.

[theBishop]

Oh I see.  Thanks for clearing that up as was unsure.  Everytime learn something new Im even more impressed with this new tech!

Editing post, so read recently about man who added wedding vows or something to Blockchain and was proud to say will stay forever.  Doesnt stuff like that add unnecessarily Blockchain size?

[pontiacg5]

Oh I see.  Thanks for clearing that up as was unsure.  Everytime learn something new Im even more impressed with this new tech!

Editing post, so read recently about man who added wedding vows or something to Blockchain and was proud to say will stay forever.  Doesnt stuff like that add unnecessarily Blockchain size?

If it is what I think it is, that falls under the "It still is possible to send "messages" in the blockchain, but that's more complicated than I can explain." I addressed earlier. I don't believe that method actually involves submitting your own transactions, but picking and choosing choice bits of info from previous confirmed transactions and cataloging them together. In that way you could use the blockchain almost as a dictionary, to recompile a message with a lot less seed info than the resulting message.

That's my basic understanding, pretty cool stuff!

[zatoichi]

"What? It is supposed to slow down miners, that is exactly the point of the difficulty. While you may be a greedy bastard wanting to mine at a lower difficulty than everyone else, the rest of us know that would break bitcoin, in that case whatever you managed to mine would be worthless, so enjoy."

You may want bitcoin to be a utopian community but it needs to function in the real world that actually has devious greedy people.

My favorite story of greed:

While the battle of waterloo raged everyone in London looked to Baron Rothchild (I think) who they figured would hear about the result of the battle first. He sold everything and everyone thought Napoleon had won. The market collapses. At the bottom Rothchild snaps up everything having sold his investments at the top of the trough. Napoleon of course had lost.

If Bitcoin can't handle this kind of greed, time to slink away.

Now mind you I'm not a free market fanatic (there are no free markets actually...unregulated markets naturally produce monopolies. As soon as someone has a competitive advantage it's like Bobby Fisher's chess game, trade trade trade...each trade magnifying your advantage.) In business as your market share increases your costs go down due to volume buying and everybody else's costs go up since they are buying smaller quantites. Markets have to be regulated.)

Money is not a mathematicaL system, it's a human system. Right now to me this seems like a HUGE risk, some say just to avoid a 2% transaction fee. Well there's nothing that wakes you up like a 100% loss.

[pontiacg5]

"What? It is supposed to slow down miners, that is exactly the point of the difficulty. While you may be a greedy bastard wanting to mine at a lower difficulty than everyone else, the rest of us know that would break bitcoin, in that case whatever you managed to mine would be worthless, so enjoy."

You may want bitcoin to be a utopian community but it needs to function in the real world that actually has devious greedy people.

My favorite story of greed:

While the battle of waterloo raged everyone in London looked to Baron Rothchild (I think) who they figured would hear about the result of the battle first. He sold everything and everyone thought Napoleon had won. The market collapses. At the bottom Rothchild snaps up everything having sold his investments at the top of the trough. Napoleon of course had lost.

If Bitcoin can't handle this kind of greed, time to slink away.

Now mind you I'm not a free market fanatic (there are no free markets actually...unregulated markets naturally produce monopolies. As soon as someone has a competitive advantage it's like Bobby Fisher's chess game, trade trade trade...each trade magnifying your advantage.) In business as your market share increases your costs go down due to volume buying and everybody else's costs go up since they are buying smaller quantites. Markets have to be regulated.)

Money is not a mathematicaL system, it's a human system. Right now to me this seems like a HUGE risk, some say just to avoid a 2% transaction fee. Well there's nothing that wakes you up like a 100% loss.

Again, you make absolutely no sense. Your story relates in no way to mining. Bitcoin can't stand insider trading???

I don't even know how to respond because I don't even know what you are trying to say. Bitcoin is hard coded to prevent greedy people and monopolies, yet you want to morph and change it to make it easier to mine? If you have a problem with how bitcoin mining works, go mine an altcoin to take bitcoin's place when it fails. Whatever you pick won't be called bitcoin.

[zatoichi]

Your right, it's not about mining. The most likely analogue is after all 21 million bitcoins have been mined. Then you will have to pick the cheapest transaction processor, likely, the biggest. As they gain market share they cut their prices and push out the competition (did somebody say they hate regulation?) Then instead of charging 2% they charge 1.9% It happens all the time. All that work for 0.1% difference? Well maybe is a little more anonymous at least (but not totally).

[pontiacg5]

Your right, it's not about mining. The most likely analogue is after all 21 million bitcoins have been mined. Then you will have to pick the cheapest transaction processor, likely, the biggest. As they gain market share they cut their prices and push out the competition (did somebody say they hate regulation?) Then instead of charging 2% they charge 1.9% It happens all the time. All that work for 0.1% difference? Well maybe is a little more anonymous at least (but not totally).

So we are talking about a potential issue more than 100 years in the future. Alright...

No lone "transaction processor" would ever monopolize on the transactions. If they did they would destroy the network security and trustless operation that gives bitcoin value. To monopolize the market is the same as tanking it, but there won't be a recovery with you in control.

Also, others with serious money in bitcoin would invest in mining transactions if they saw one going for a monopoly for the same reason.

All 100 years in the future of course,

[cryptomatt]

The difficulty is just an adjusting variable (up or down) to target a 600 second (10 min) block generation time.

As for block chain size, it will be an important topic in the near future.  As bitcoin gains more adoption and the number of transactions goes up, the block chain growth will be huge.  Having to download a 100gb block chain would be a real annoyance for many.  Possible innovative changes to the protocol may be needed to avoid this.

[zatoichi]

Also if they exceed 51% of the transaction processing power, things get interesting.

[pontiacg5]

Also if they exceed 51% of the transaction processing power, things get interesting.

!!!!

No duh! What do you think monopolizing mining power is?

That is why it will not happen. If a company tried to entirely monopolize bitcoin mining they'd destroy it. That would destroy any profit they'd gain from monopolizing the market.