Does Bitcoin become more decentralized over time?

[DaveF]

For nodes: Drive's are falling in price, 5g is coming online in a lot of places, starlink and Project Kuiper are going to bring high speed internet to a lot of places. I think once that happens, when you can get a RPi type box with 2 TB of storage you are going to see a lot more project nodes and things come online all over the place.

I partially disagree, you don't need very fast internet connection to run full node. Fast internet connection only needed to let your node download whole blockchain quickly.

Yes....but, you do waiting weeks to do the initial download will turn off a lot of people.
Also, add reliable internet.  If your connection keeps dropping and you have to keep waiting to get caught up to send your funds or to look for payments also sucks.

I think current size of Bitcoin blockchain is around 330 GB, and with current yearly growth of around 25% I think that having few TB disc will last for years without any issue.

If the only thing on your machine is Bitcoin and your OS, yes. I was thinking about some poorer locations where you only have one PC so it's for bitcoin, surfing the web, doing school work, downloading videos, running quickbooks, etc. That can eat up drive space quickly.

-Dave

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[Khaos77]

Some people says raising Bitcoin block size hurt decentralization because it increases cost to run a full node. Bitcoin block size limit remains at 1MB 4 million weight units in past few years, while hardware and internet continue growing. The growth could be higher speed, higher efficiency or lower cost. With that in mind and ignoring other factor (such as blockchain size growth, hashrate distribution and total of full nodes), does Bitcoin become more decentralized over time?

P.S. This is just my shower thought, so obviously it has flaws.

You have to do nothing , but observe the past ~11 year history of bitcoin.
Blocksize is irrelevant in the discussion.

Centralization is and already has occurred , limited mining pools only 3 or 4 have over 51% and have had over 51% for years.

The second ASICS were invented and the little guy was pushed aside in mining, decentralization died.

[pooya87]

I'd prefer having more nodes with the entire blockchain rather than nodes which only stores the last few GBs of the blockchain which really wouldn't benefit the network more than the others.

We can only argue that more Archival Full Nodes are going to benefit the network only if there is a shortage of them that makes syncing hard for new nodes that come online or puts extra pressure on the existing Archival Full Nodes.
I don't think this is the case since we have enough of them to supply the historical blockchain.

The Pruned Full Nodes are benefiting the network and contributing to decentralization by doing what any full node would do: enforce consensus rules.

[ranochigo]

How is that? Pruned nodes "benefit the network" just like any other full node, with just one exception: they are not helpful with the stupid bootstrap process in the current (experimental) implementation of the protocol, nothing else, not a tiny bit of any sign of being inferior compared to a historian full node ... I just made it up  

And that is why I think we have fundamentally different ideas of how Bitcoin should function, based on your past response about how verification of block data is not necessary, etc. If your view is that blockchain data is not important, then I believe that you'll probably disagree with everything that I say.

We can only argue that more Archival Full Nodes are going to benefit the network only if there is a shortage of them that makes syncing hard for new nodes that come online or puts extra pressure on the existing Archival Full Nodes.
I don't think this is the case since we have enough of them to supply the historical blockchain.

I believe that there is nothing wrong with making it more available. Having more "archival" full nodes would be far more useful for initial synchronization both in terms of it's speed and availability. I'm aware that pruned nodes can almost function like an "archival" full node but I fail to see how it would be as beneficial than the other, given that the bulk of the benefits falls on the user using the full node. If the blockchain size grows even further, people that are hosting them on RPis and servers may not want to run it anymore.

[pooya87]

but I fail to see how it would be as beneficial than the other, given that the bulk of the benefits falls on the user using the full node.

Pruned nodes are obviously not as beneficial as archival nodes but they are still beneficial to the network and contribute to decentralization of the network.

If the blockchain size grows even further, people that are hosting them on RPis and servers may not want to run it anymore.

In my opinion people running a full node on RPis aren't really helping anyone. They are more of a hobby thing to use rather than a serious full node set out to make a contribution to the backbone of bitcoin.

[20kevin20]

Yes....but, you do waiting weeks to do the initial download will turn off a lot of people.
Also, add reliable internet.  If your connection keeps dropping and you have to keep waiting to get caught up to send your funds or to look for payments also sucks.

I have a low-to-mid range gaming laptop from ~2012 and I wanted to use it as a full node for my BTC activity. I thought old PCs were not going to be an issue in holding full nodes on them, but I recently gave up the idea.

Having to wait 2-3 weeks for the blockchain to fully sync is annoying, so is having to catch up with the latest blocks. I usually have to leave my laptop running overnight to catch up with all blocks if the laptop has been turned off for a few days.

The fact that you cannot simply take an older PC to use it with your Bitcoin activity (or a RPi) sucks tbh. Unless nodes become more portable and require less computing power and storage space, full nodes will slowly become less and less affordable for the average person.

When you get your first BTC, if you're in it for the tech, you're likely going to look for the safest way to store it.. but if the safest one is too expensive or takes awfully long, you're going to rather use an SPV wallet or a custodial one. The problem is that I'm not very sure that HDDs and SSDs will become cheaper fast enough. If the block size gets to 500-750GB before 1TB storage components become as cheap as 500GB ones are today, then running full nodes will become less and less affordable so it'll still be the richer who'll afford it..

[20kevin20]

Although it's hobby thing, i think they still help Bitcoin network if they allow incoming connection (with proper router configuration).

Do they help if the RPi is in a constant bottleneck though? There was a time when portable RPi Zero full nodes were being sold around, and these certainly don't meet the requirements for running a full node and incoming connections might only make things worse. The lowest possible version of it that could handle full nodes decently are probably from RPi 3 and up; otherwise, it's all just a struggle for both the RPi owner and those connecting to it

[Pmalek]

If you ask someone who mined bitcoin with his GPU/CPU in the beginning, the network has become quite centralized in the sense that you can no longer do that. It would be like a human competing against a calculator who will finish his multiplication faster. Bitcoin is decentralized for those who have the financial means to invest in expensive hardware and compete against huge mining firms, and this will become more and more difficult in the future. Ask a solo miner if it is.

[vjudeu]

If you ask someone who mined bitcoin with his GPU/CPU in the beginning, the network has become quite centralized in the sense that you can no longer do that.

You can mine altcoins and exchange them for Bitcoin as soon as possible, it is the simplest way that works for now. Mining single satoshis with a CPU and receiving them by LN would be awesome and would make things less centralized, but such ideas need more research to bring it into reality.

[aliashraf]

If your view is that blockchain data is not important, then I believe that you'll probably disagree with everything that I say.

No reasonable person would suggest such thing, blockchain data not being important  

A blockchain is a data structure that preserves data, a database. Any database goes through events/transactions continuously and as a consequence its state is subject to change through time. What matters from the perspective of most applications is the state and not the events/transactions.  They are valuable as far as they are relevant as a part of the state. In Bitcoin case, a transaction is not relevant anymore when all of its outputs are spent.

The naive "rewind" approach to bootstrapping fresh nodes which is employed in the current Bitcoin implementation is not the only technology available, there are more robust, trust-less, and secure approaches as well.

[dkbit98]

At current capacity, Bitcoin can't stay at that rate of growth if we want to accommodate more transactions. I'm not too sure about the rate of growth for HDDs, price might have gotten cheaper but the growth of Bitcoin could be faster than the growth of HDD capacity. I have doubts that most people can have enough space for a full node ontop of their own files and would probably just to forego that completely. Coupled with a fairly long initial synchronization as well as a catchup after not opening it for a while.

I have multiple discs and I am not even near the full capacity and having one dedicated drive or partition just for Bitcoin blockchain is not that hard for anyone today.
Let me give you few examples, I think anyone can afford to purchase 4TB (or less) Toshiba or Seagate HDD for under $100 or even cheaper with some deal.
If we want to choose faster Samsung SSD with 2TB we can find them for $250 or cheaper.

Now we can't exactly predict size of Bitcoin blockchain but looking at this Statista chart, I think we are not going to reach even 400GB or 500GB in next few years, and data from Ycharts is showing 142.6% Average Growth Rate.

[FatFork]

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Now we can't exactly predict size of Bitcoin blockchain but looking at this Statista chart, I think we are not going to reach even 400GB or 500GB in next few years, and data from Ycharts is showing 142.6% Average Growth Rate.

And since we've had an exponential growth in computer storage capacity so far, and there's no reason to expect something dramatic to change in the foreseeable future, I don't believe we're ever going to get into trouble storing blockchain data.

[NotATether]

Bitcoin block size limit remains at 1MB 4 million weight units in past few years, while hardware and internet continue growing.

As you might have noticed already, (residential) internet speed does not grow. It is forever fixated at some arbitrary value like 5mbps or 20mbps depending on how benevolent your provider is (*cough* Comcast *cough*).  

This presents a special problem where as the blockchain grows, nodes running from home starve out and everybody starts moving to cloud servers for hosting nodes. We've probably already optimized the peer discovery so much that it's easy to find multiple nodes to continue downloading blocks from, and I don't think further speed up of the initial sync is possible, especially on artificially crippled residential lines, even if the current ZMQ message channels (at least for block and tx messages) give you Bittorrent magnet links instead.

Some people would like to run Core but they have a crappy 500kbps D-Link instead of a proper router and using one is probably out of the question, so there should be some kind of "lite" sync where each of these nodes verifies only a fraction of those blocks (we're talking around 1% here) and they somehow signal the integrity of all the other blocks. Millions of these "lite" nodes each verifying different blocks should provide the same security strength while being fast to sync.

[DaveF]

Bitcoin block size limit remains at 1MB 4 million weight units in past few years, while hardware and internet continue growing.

As you might have noticed already, (residential) internet speed does not grow. It is forever fixated at some arbitrary value like 5mbps or 20mbps depending on how benevolent your provider is (*cough* Comcast *cough*).  
...

Which is why I mentioned starlink and Project Kuiper earlier.

Yes you have more latency then cable / fios but it's still going to be competition an that is going to force the local providers to step up their game or wonder where all they customers went.

Not to mention the ones they loose to residential 5g.

The days of the crap cable providers although not ending soon, are not going to be forever.

-Dave

[amishmanish]

I am in a fairly urban area in one of the fastest developing countries of the world where we have good enough internet data capacity and speed to watch a few episodes on Netflix every second day. Yet, it is nowhere near the almost 200 GB plus upload/ download that a Bitcoin full node needs right now.

Any talk of increasing blocksize should first consider the actual internet availability. Only the most affluent of cities have those kind of limits.

Even if better internet reaches everywhere, you still won't solve the issue of Bitcoin being resource intensive. Already, we have calculations about how Bitcoin electricity consumption is equivalent to some Scandinavian country's consumption. Next it'll be about data and how much of it is being consumed by Blockchain ledgers, especially Bitcoin.

[Wind_FURY]

I am in a fairly urban area in one of the fastest developing countries of the world where we have good enough internet data capacity and speed to watch a few episodes on Netflix every second day. Yet, it is nowhere near the almost 200 GB plus upload/ download that a Bitcoin full node needs right now.

Any talk of increasing blocksize should first consider the actual internet availability. Only the most affluent of cities have those kind of limits.

Even if better internet reaches everywhere, you still won't solve the issue of Bitcoin being resource intensive. Already, we have calculations about how Bitcoin electricity consumption is equivalent to some Scandinavian country's consumption. Next it'll be about data and how much of it is being consumed by Blockchain ledgers, especially Bitcoin.

From Bitcoin’s viewpoint, does it need to be “solved”? I believe the people who say that it’s “a problem”, don’t truly understand Bitcoin. Or try not to understand that there’s more to Bitcoin, and more to its implications on Banking and Finance’s current condition, than what we see. Maybe energy companies could become the new foundation from which sound, hard money is produced and issued.

[zeuner]

Some people says raising Bitcoin block size hurt decentralization because it increases cost to run a full node. Bitcoin block size limit remains at 1MB 4 million weight units in past few years, while hardware and internet continue growing. The growth could be higher speed, higher efficiency or lower cost. With that in mind and ignoring other factor (such as blockchain size growth, hashrate distribution and total of full nodes), does Bitcoin become more decentralized over time?

P.S. This is just my shower thought, so obviously it has flaws.

How would you plan to measure decentralization? Even if two participants of the Bitcoin protocol appear as different nodes, they might have an out-of-band connection and be ran by the same person.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Actually the number of bitcoin full nodes is more volatile than the price itself! It goes up and down with wild swings.

Since a full node connects with few nodes, I want to know how it is calculated that there were ~200k nodes running Bitcoin Core. Since there isn't a database that keeps every IP, the network is decentralized. The *only* thing I see as "database" is the connection count of vSeeds on chainparams.cpp:

Code:

vSeeds.emplace_back("seed.bitcoin.sipa.be"); // Pieter Wuille, only supports x1, x5, x9, and xd
vSeeds.emplace_back("dnsseed.bluematt.me"); // Matt Corallo, only supports x9
vSeeds.emplace_back("dnsseed.bitcoin.dashjr.org"); // Luke Dashjr
vSeeds.emplace_back("seed.bitcoinstats.com"); // Christian Decker, supports x1 - xf
vSeeds.emplace_back("seed.bitcoin.jonasschnelli.ch"); // Jonas Schnelli, only supports x1, x5, x9, and xd
vSeeds.emplace_back("seed.btc.petertodd.org"); // Peter Todd, only supports x1, x5, x9, and xd
vSeeds.emplace_back("seed.bitcoin.sprovoost.nl"); // Sjors Provoost
vSeeds.emplace_back("dnsseed.emzy.de"); // Stephan Oeste
vSeeds.emplace_back("seed.bitcoin.wiz.biz"); // Jason Maurice

If these vSeeds were added before v0.15.0, then they exist on almost every node of the network. Technically, they could count every different IP that connects with them with Bitcoin Core.

[pooya87]

Since a full node connects with few nodes, I want to know how it is calculated that there were ~200k nodes running Bitcoin Core.

That's the default behavior since there is no point in connecting to all nodes but we have customized code that connects to other nodes and gathers information. Like the node crawlers that infest the bitcoin network!
If you want the details of how such software works you'll have to look at their code or ask those who wrote and are running such things. But I suppose it is a combination of having a well connected node with a good latency and a large socket backlog to accept any incoming connection while also connecting to other nodes and getting their addr list to check and advertise its own IP.

Since there isn't a database that keeps every IP, the network is decentralized. The *only* thing I see as "database" is the connection count of vSeeds on chainparams.cpp:

If these vSeeds were added before v0.15.0, then they exist on almost every node of the network. Technically, they could count every different IP that connects with them with Bitcoin Core.

These servers only store the IP addresses of the most reliable nodes that are accepting incoming connections not all IPs. Even if they stored the IP addresses of those connecting to them it won't be reliable because just because someone is digging them doesn't mean they are running a bitcoin node such as bitcoin core. You can for example dig them like this: https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/dig/

[BlackHatCoiner]

If you want the details of how such software works you'll have to look at their code or ask those who wrote and are running such things. But I suppose it is a combination of having a well connected node with a good latency and a large socket backlog to accept any incoming connection while also connecting to other nodes and getting their addr list to check and advertise its own IP.

So they find nodes' IPs whether you have Bitcoin Core or not. Even if I remove those vSeeds and then build Bitcoin Core, sooner or later I'll be listed on their address list. Interesting, I wonder how their code works. So these IP addresses on vSeeds send and receive new IPs continually, but not blocks. I always thought that vSeeds are the "default" nodes of the network that were chosen by the Bitcoin Core developers.