How scalable is Blockchain in terms of size/speed?

[cuttie018]

I wonder, how scalable is the Blockchain in terms of size of data. It grows every day and the speed of data processing on the server side must inevitably go down. Am I right? Where can I read about this? I'm sure there was some analysis done already. Thanks!

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[Stedsm]

Why do you believe that the increase in size of Blockchain can cut down its data processing speed? It has been witnessed that whenever the size has increased, the community have always come up with some solution every time and dealt with the issues. Those were the times when it was possible that the speed of data processing may have gone down due to blockage in mempool, but this is not the case any more. People are using different nature of technology i.e.; SegWit and helping the network save both energy and data consumption whereas going up with the speeds it is achieving at a daily pace.

[pereira4]

Blockchains do not scale on-chain globally, decentralized ones at least (and that is, the Bitcoin blockchain, the rest aren't decentralized). In order to keep the whole thing from collapsing upon itself, there's a fee market. If you want prioritize your transaction, pay an higher fee.

With clever tricks like segwit you can keep squeezing on-chain transactions in for cheaper prices, but the future is second layer scaling. You cannot exponentially keep raising the blocksize, it has to be lineal growth so it's predictable, beside the fact that the game theory doesn't allow you to hardfork every time someone feels like "we need to scale".

[Wind_FURY]

I wonder, how scalable is the Blockchain in terms of size of data.

A blockchain that's merely a chain of blocks running in a datacenter might be very scalable, and very fast. Like Paypal.

It grows every day and the speed of data processing on the server side must inevitably go down.

That's the cost the server should bear.

Am I right? Where can I read about this? I'm sure there was some analysis done already. Thanks!

If asking about Bitcoin, I believe the question should be, "what's the maximum block size can the network bear today, without centralizing the network? - If a hard fork was a non-issue."

[pereira4]

Blockchains do not scale on-chain globally, decentralized ones at least (and that is, the Bitcoin blockchain, the rest aren't decentralized). In order to keep the whole thing from collapsing upon itself, there's a fee market. If you want prioritize your transaction, pay an higher fee.

With clever tricks like segwit you can keep squeezing on-chain transactions in for cheaper prices, but the future is second layer scaling. You cannot exponentially keep raising the blocksize, it has to be lineal growth so it's predictable, beside the fact that the game theory doesn't allow you to hardfork every time someone feels like "we need to scale".

Segwit is a joke, and secondary solutions are just that secondary,
if the primary onchain jams up the secondary will also fail.  

The Future will require a larger blocksize or a faster blocktime, deny it all you like.
When transactions fees start exceeding $20 and it takes days to complete a transaction,
there will be an outrage demanding a hard fork or everyone will just move to another coin that provides onchain scaling.

Precisely, the reason you guarantee the primary doesn't fall is by protocol solidification, derived from a de-facto reached decentralization which Only Bitcoin has reached, organically (no other way). You build on top of this, so if what you build falls, you have a place to fall back. Granted, the impact on price and hashrate would be felt, however, Bitcoin would outlive a fatal second layer error/exploit, as well as a fatal segwit error/exploit. This requires many years of studying Bitcoin and understanding the fine layers of game theory around it. By the time you reach this point, you may have lost half of your BTC stack in a variety of shitcoins which promised you to solve whatever you considered to be problem but proven to be a solution in practice.

[cipherhut]

Scalability has a capacity to change in size and scale by measuring the ability of a process, network, software, or organization to grow and manage increased demand. Blockchain is a potential technology that disrupts and improvises industries and traditionally centralized systems. Blockchain technology scale and processes transactions at speed, way above its alternatives with enhanced capabilities.

[aundroid]

I wonder, how scalable is the Blockchain in terms of size of data. It grows every day and the speed of data processing on the server side must inevitably go down. Am I right? Where can I read about this? I'm sure there was some analysis done already. Thanks!

The size of the blockchain itself has no effect on the future transaction processing speed.

With p2p databases (no matter if blockchain, distributed hash tables or dynamo) one generally distinguishes between vertical and horizontal scaling.

Horizontal scaling means adding more nodes. Since in a blockchain network every transaction has to be processed by every node, there is no added value.
Vertical scaling means a larger maximum block size. This would increase the throughput, but at the same time the blockchain would quickly increase in size.
(and a larger blockchain usually implies a more centralized system)

[Wind_FURY]

Newbies should start reading/learning about what's important about Bitcoin, its blockchain, and learn why the decisions taken by the Core developers is the better path. Security, decentralization, censorship-resistance, and finality.

[franky1]

the decisions taken by the Core developers...
vs
....censorship-resistance

and yet core are the censors....
just look at how many bips and idea's they have censored
just look at how many dev teams they threw out the community

you have certainly drunk the core koolaid

[Wind_FURY]

the decisions taken by the Core developers...
vs
....censorship-resistance

and yet core are the censors....
just look at how many bips and idea's they have censored
just look at how many dev teams they threw out the community

you have certainly drunk the core koolaid

Censorship-resistance, and security of Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency through decentralization, and your complaints about a group of developers who reject some "ideas" are two different things.

Why? You want me to drink the Roger Ver kool aid?

[franky1]

Censorship-resistance, and security of Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency through decentralization, and your complaints about a group of developers who reject some "ideas" are two different things.

Why? You want me to drink the Roger Ver kool aid?

1. by a group even being able to reject an idea before the whole community get to try it. is censorship
2. by a group being able to ban other teams off the network because they dont agree, is censorship
3. by you thinking that a person thats not core hugging must be opposition, is censorship
sorry but i dont follow ver.. but i do love how you show your colours of your desire for censorship by trying to say anyone that doesnt love core must be in some other group.
in bitcoin there should not be one controling implementation/group. there should be no banning other idea's off the network before new rules even get a chance of find consensus.. purely to push through one groups goals without opposition

[lightningmelo]

Blockchains do not scale. If you want to keep them decentralized (which I think is the whole point of even having a blockchain to begin with).

You can scale them by building layers on top of the base blockchain, which is very similar to how traditional payment rails work.

So side chains or solutions like the Lightning Network are the way of scaling blockchains, without actually scaling the base layer.

[Welsh]

Newbies should start reading/learning about what's important about Bitcoin, its blockchain, and learn why the decisions taken by the Core developers is the better path. Security, decentralization, censorship-resistance, and finality.

Despite the development side going fairly well in my opinion over the years. You shouldn't blindly follow anyone, and should always be looking to challenge, and better a system such as Bitcoin. They aren't always going to be making the right decisions for Bitcoin as I think that's somewhat impossible. Fortunately, the consensus usually picks a fairly good option, but maybe not always the best.

[franky1]

people say it cant scale due to storage(facepalm)

in the 1990's kodak said digital photography wont scale because a floppy disk is only 1.4mb
today, digital media smaller then the size of a postage stamp(24x physical size smaller then floppy)

and each microxd stores 1,024,000mb

[Welsh]

I definitely agree with Franky that storage in the future isn't going to be an issue. Storage continues to get better (bigger), faster, and cheaper. A few years ago a terabyte cost a lot of money when they first got released, but we are seeing them reduce to almost nothing these days, and everyone even older people who don't use computers that often have 1TB hard drives. At the moment, we don't see storage becoming a problem, and the evolution of storage isn't showing any indications that its going to slow down.

[franky1]

The only valid concern about storage is storage speed (random read/write), HDD has been proven :
1. Slowing down IBD (Initial Block Download)
2. Can't keep up when the Blockchain/Cryptocurrency network is very active. For example, you must use SSD to run Electrun full/archival node.

a block is only 1.3mb every 10 minutes.
come on, even you know hard drives have no issue with it.

as for the IBD... thats not a hard drive or internet issue. thats a programming issue. the only complaint people actually have about the IBD is that they have to download it before they can even use bitcoin.
its not a 'my computers gonna blow up' experience.
its a 'twiddling thumbs' experience

this can be solved by letting users rpc-api request their peers to fetch them a small utxo set of just the addresses needed or even an entire UTXO set, so that users can then make transactions, and the IBD becomes a secondary background event rather than a 'must do before use'

if you really think a blockchain running at 1.3mb per 10 minutes is somehow clogging up hard drive performance of hard drives of 250mb PER SECOND then there is something wrong with your 30yo hard drive. maybe time to get something made this side of the millenium. even basic simple maths puts the difference of ~1.3mb/10min vs 250mb/sec at a ~12,000x multiple

which was another laugh i made years ago when core refused a base block of 2mb.
.. and a further laugh when they went for 4mb weight, which debunked their own excuse for not doing 2mb base

[philipma1957]

Yeah  I would like to see blocks go the 2x route every once in a while.

As for being able to process this not a problem.

the ryzen 3900x is cheap  and fast  with a lot of processing.

I have a new pcie ssd  it is smoking fast.

and 10gb ethernet is right around the corner.

So I can see us going up to 32mb size blocks.

[Dabs]

There might even be a few people refurbishing old servers with plenty of RAM to hold the entire blockchain. There are servers now with 1 TB of RAM. You could run a full node in a RAM drive. In a few years, that will only increase and drop in price as well.

But there's no need, SSD's work fine. In fact, HDDs work fine right now. If you're some sort of payment processor you'll need more processing power to handle all the transactions, but that's outside the base layer or blockchain already.

[pereira4]

Yeah  I would like to see blocks go the 2x route every once in a while.

As for being able to process this not a problem.

the ryzen 3900x is cheap  and fast  with a lot of processing.

I have a new pcie ssd  it is smoking fast.

and 10gb ethernet is right around the corner.

So I can see us going up to 32mb size blocks.

The main problem with new computers is they all have backdoors, at the hardware level. With Intel you hve the "Intel Management Engine" (IME), and with AMD you have the "Platform Security Processor". IME is more understood, with PSP we don't even know anything about it. Both have proprietary blobs and cannot be flashed in current computers. So While the 3900x is awesome in it's performance, you have the privacy problem. This forces people to use old computers to run nodes.

There's also the consensus problem of course. It seems to be rather impossible to manage super consensus. This while bad for scaling, is good as the store of value proposal, since you want the thing to be immutable.

[franky1]

The main problem with new computers is they all have backdoors, at the hardware level. With Intel you hve the "Intel Management Engine" (IME), and with AMD you have the "Platform Security Processor". IME is more understood, with PSP we don't even know anything about it. Both have proprietary blobs and cannot be flashed in current computers. So While the 3900x is awesome in it's performance, you have the privacy problem. This forces people to use old computers to run nodes.

There's also the consensus problem of course. It seems to be rather impossible to manage super consensus. This while bad for scaling, is good as the store of value proposal, since you want the thing to be immutable.

True, but are you sure old computer (which is fast enough to run full node) don't have backdoor?
1. At least for Intel processor, IME has been around since 2008
2. Older processor have few known vulnerability (such as https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/sinkhole)

Unless you're going to use niche processor, chipset or SoC such as RISC-V, i doubt you could avoid backdoor or known vulnerability

too many people think bitcoin will in 20-40 years ned to run on $1000 desktop computer or $100,000 servers.
just like they thought mining bitcoin would go from CPU to needing a $100,000 server
the reality is you can get something that mines btc the physical size of a shoe box that is 1billion times faster than a cpu/gpu, thus no server scenario. as people can still individually buy asics and run them from home

same will happen with node hardware. people will start producing hardware specific for being a node. with th benefit of not having to worry about hash competition of trying to outpace other nodes
just take how fast mining hardware changed.
2013. GPU $600 1ghash
2019. ASIC $27 1,000,000ghash ($1430/53thash)

just imagine how many transactions can be verified using an asic chip designed specifically to validate signatures. and a device had multiple chips to allow multiple transaction validity at once.