Congratulation, Bitcoin has reached 500 GB size hard disk data

[DooMAD]

And thus the tedious and banal merry-go-round continues to spin.

franky1 asserts softforks shouldn't be allowed.  I ask him how he would achieve that.  He avoids the question and claims censorship.

franky1 asserts core are in full control.  I point out that devs can't make changes if users don't run the code.  He claims users are "mindless sheep" and run the code anyway (This seems statistically unlikely, given that there are over 13000 publicly reachable Core nodes in operation.  They can't all be sheep).

franky1 asserts there should be more clients to choose from and users can then have options about what code to run.  I ask where franky1's code is and he acts like he somehow has the moral high-ground for having no code.  If you want an alternative, the onus is on you to present a viable alternative.

franky1 asserts he is an early adopter who is quite wealthy and financially independent.  I point out he could hire a developer or two to code something he would approve of.  He seems to think he should be able to order devs about for free.  He wants all of the influence, but none of the accompanying responsibility.

Rinse, repeat.  Time and again.


He has all the hallmarks of a successful cult leader, if it weren't for that fact that hardly anyone listens to him.  

@doomad
i have answered the questions (hardening consensus)

That's not a "how".  If I said "How do you bake a cake" and you replied "In the oven and then slap some icing on top" it's pretty clear to any onlookers that you've skipped a few important steps.

[1714470042]

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[franky1]

@doomad
i have answered the questions (hardening consensus) (adding rules that strengthen the byte count per opcode to prevent databloat abuse)(fee formuleas that penalise spammers more than everyone)
and yes they can all be implemented.
YOU play the amnesia card, to distract from the actual issues to spin it back on "franky needs to do something"

grow up you are no PR guy, nor even know what you are defending
try to read more code and less social chatter

if you forget. read your own post history to remember the topics you have spoken of rather then asking me about what you have asked for before. and then you will find the answers in replies to it

[Fivestar4everMVP]

And another question that came to my mind while reading the OP was , why do i need to download the entire bitcoin blockchain data when I am not a developer? I mean what is the essence actually, I personally would prefer to keep it simple just as I have always kept it from the beginning, that is, buy bitcoin from exchanges, move them to my non custodial wallet for holding, and if for any reason I decide to sell, I move them back to an exchange and sell, its that simple .

I probably will need to become a developer to understand the benefits of downloading the whole bitcoin core network to my computer.

[franky1]

And another question that came to my mind while reading the OP was , why do i need to download the entire bitcoin blockchain data when I am not a developer? I mean what is the essence actually, I personally would prefer to keep it simple just as I have always kept it from the beginning, that is, buy bitcoin from exchanges, move them to my non custodial wallet for holding, and if for any reason I decide to sell, I move them back to an exchange and sell, its that simple .

I probably will need to become a developer to understand the benefits of downloading the whole bitcoin core network to my computer.

YEARS ago. people wanted to protect the network by lots of people having the blockchain distributed across lots of computers so that no single location had a master copy. thus reducing the risk of someone just changing a tx value and then being the master. everyone just complying that its the master record

next was the ruleset of what was acceptable to be allowed in a block. and thus what blocks were allowed to be added ontop previous blocks. to ensure the data and value within followed a set of rules

EG 2 people have a pile of lego
if each person has rules of 2x2 yellow followed by 2x2 red followed by 2x2 blue
they would all end up with the sale tower of sale colour combinations

where again due to network distribution YEARS ago majority had to upgrade their node to be ready to verify a new rule (majority ready meant rule was safe and accepted to be activated and used) and such then a new rule would activate and he network would verify the data follows the rules including the new rule(consensus)
.....
but since the consensus had been softened alot since 2017.
it no longer requires majority node upgrade pre new rule activation. and with features like pruning old data... alot more nodes no longer hold the entire blockchain.. but are social conned into being told they are stil full nodes defending the decentralised network(facepalm)meaning there is a smaller amount of nodes that do fully archive who are in less numbers so more pressured and treated as master nodes(real full nodes) and others are fool(leacher) nodes

its not just that less nodes fully archive. but now those that do have to seed it to more leecher nodes. meaning more leecher nodes are relying on a smaller source of seed nodes for blockchain data. leachers nodes just follow whatever he full nodes give them. and all the other risks that implies

and all that combined changes over the years has weakened the network to let in silly transaction formats that allow <4mb of bloat, untested, unverified and treated as (default:isvalid)
meaning allowing alot of deadweight data of no financial payment function to fill up a block.. lowering the transaction count per block. wasting the space

which will just make more people not want to be full nodes if all they are storing is a x% of unwanted memes

..
if you dont want to be a full node user you are not forced to. you can just use a lite wallet. that just makes transactions and moves your value
but if you want to be a full node.. be a full node and not a fool node

[Artemis3]

I don't feel like running my node if this situation doesn't improve. Using my limited resources to benefit a bunch of spammers? No thanks.

[BADecker]

If I want to start my own full node, is it better to simply let the client update on its own? Or is there somewhere I could download a trustworthy bootstrap? Would the bootstrap save any time in downloading?

[AverageGlabella]

If I want to start my own full node, is it better to simply let the client update on its own? Or is there somewhere I could download a trustworthy bootstrap? Would the bootstrap save any time in downloading?

Do not download the blockchain from a 3rd party that goes against the principle of having a full node. If you want to run a node you want to make sure you download the blockchain from the source and it verifies correctly because if you download it from a 3rd part they could have altered the blockchain without you knowing. It should not verify and should show a error but I would not risk downloading it. I doubt it would save a lot of time downloading the blockchain is quicker then it was many years ago it mostly gets slow when you have poor hardware or internet connection.

I don't feel like running my node if this situation doesn't improve. Using my limited resources to benefit a bunch of spammers? No thanks.

The spammers a small part of the blockchain that have tried to make their mark in history but by creating a node and running it 24/7 you are benefiting the community and making it more secure if everyone had this opinion and they shut down their nodes btc would be insecure and die over night. We have a lot of people running nodes and if you are limited on resources or you are not running it daily then you do not have to because there are many people to verify the network.

[franky1]

if your doing initial block download via TOR
expect it to be SUPER slow download (tor bottleneck)

[LoyceV]

If I want to start my own full node, is it better to simply let the client update on its own?

Yes.

Or is there somewhere I could download a trustworthy bootstrap?

Who's crazy enough to share 397 GB compressed data? Wait, that would be me: tmp.loyce.club/bootstrap.tar.gz (this file is scheduled to be deleted in 30 days). This includes blocks and chainstate, both updated until today. I had to figure out parallel compression to speed it up.

Code:

sha256sum: 5854df9285ce6eee9083d10c2acd8635bb13f0a588761d3edcb267c062c5a1ea

Would the bootstrap save any time in downloading?

Maybe, maybe not. It would be cool if you try both, and answer this question once and for all

Do not download the blockchain from a 3rd party that goes against the principle of having a full node.

You can (and should) have your own Bitcoin Core verify all blocks again. That undoes any potential time savings from downloading the bootstrap

No one make such file these days.

Lol. You posted this while I was making it: compression, verification and checksum took some time.

[Artemis3]

Hmm wait, if you managed to compress it further it then its not a bad idea at all. For a full node i see no issue, since you just can't have something different from the rest, or else you yourself will be isolated from the network.

I was wondering what compression algorithm would work best with the blockchain, surely you tried xz and 7z among others?.
https://linuxreviews.org/Comparison_of_Compression_Algorithms

A torrent would be nice (don't want to overload your server).

[franky1]

when core has a milestone in the code that before X blockheight, blocks are treated as (assumevalid)

many many users 'could' compress up a chainfile or a utxoset state of that milestone height. get the file hash for integrity check and sign that they have verified the integrity (much like they sign for a hash of compiled core exe)

where people can then check the hash of a compressed file matches to know the content matches. which then people can download milestoned (assumevalid) blocks in a lump
and then build ontop of from said blockheight the natural peer way
(as long as there are alot of independant* reviewers signing the same hash for integrity)(*not the same social/cult-ural group)

[LoyceV]

I was wondering what compression algorithm would work best with the blockchain, surely you tried xz and 7z among others?.

Try it Just take a block-file, and compress it. I expected bzip2 to be the best, but it wasn't so I went back to gz (which is faster). I used pigz -9 -p8 (best compression on all cores). I shortly tried "-11", but that was around 20 times slower.

A torrent would be nice (don't want to overload your server).

I tried torrents for another project, but it was annoying to keep working. Feel free to download it, the server is mostly idling and uses only 20% of it's allowed bandwidth. This server was donated for cool blockchain projects, so this is exactly what it was meant to do.

[Volgastallion]

I want to make a parallelism, or maybe i can say a historical parallelism. Or analogy whatever you want to call.

When Bitcoin was born  we cant think in have the net in our hand, maybe we can have that in a laptop, but now you can have the full net in your hand in a smartphone.

500 gb its nothing for today tecnology. So imagine in ten years more where we can be. Maybe in our wrist in a smatwatch. Your wallet and the whole bitcoin core in your wrist.

[nullama]

I want to make a parallelism, or maybe i can say a historical parallelism. Or analogy whatever you want to call.

When Bitcoin was born  we cant think in have the net in our hand, maybe we can have that in a laptop, but now you can have the full net in your hand in a smartphone.

500 gb its nothing for today tecnology. So imagine in ten years more where we can be. Maybe in our wrist in a smatwatch. Your wallet and the whole bitcoin core in your wrist.

Technology has changed quite a lot since 2009.

Yes, 500GB is nothing for today. And following Moore's Law, in ten years we should have devices holding up to 16TB (doubling every two years) that are as common as 500GB devices are today.

I mean, you can have a laptop today with more RAM (64GB) than a hard disk in 2009. Advances in technology have been amazing.

[AverageGlabella]

@LoyceV If you think that everyone should download and verify the blockchain on their own and not rely on 3rd party downloads may I ask why you are compressing it? Are you planning on releasing this and why?

I do not think you have bad intentions I just fear that newbies or people that do not know the risks might download this thinking it is a good thing to do and is normal. I think you should probably include a warning saying that this is not normal and you should download & verify the blockchain yourself. I guess for someone who wants to look around the software with a full blockchain but not use it for integrity could find a use for downloading the entire blockchain from a quicker source then direct but that is all I can think of.

I want to make a parallelism, or maybe i can say a historical parallelism. Or analogy whatever you want to call.

When Bitcoin was born  we cant think in have the net in our hand, maybe we can have that in a laptop, but now you can have the full net in your hand in a smartphone.

500 gb its nothing for today tecnology. So imagine in ten years more where we can be. Maybe in our wrist in a smatwatch. Your wallet and the whole bitcoin core in your wrist.

Technology has changed quite a lot since 2009.

Yes, 500GB is nothing for today. And following Moore's Law, in ten years we should have devices holding up to 16TB (doubling every two years) that are as common as 500GB devices are today.

I mean, you can have a laptop today with more RAM (64GB) than a hard disk in 2009. Advances in technology have been amazing.

yes but it will slow down at some point. The whole point of moores law is that there is a quick growth at the early stages of technology and huge advances are made but the longer that it is developed and exists the slower because you are not able to condense the components as much and not able to make them faster. I do not think we are there yet but I am not qualified to speculate when this will be because I do not know all the details but I would expect it to slow down at some point and I will give a example of m2 SSD look how small these components are it is hard to believe that they can make them faster then they are because on most operating systems it will boot up in seconds and the size is tiny and can fit in a closed fist. Making them smaller will probably not yield any benefit to because they are already very small.

[franky1]

i remember the moores law of the 1990's

i had a desktop. it had 3.5gb hard drive and 256mb ram and cost $1000
techy guys were saying there was a hard limit of 4gb on hard drives
they also said processors can only do 4ghz
and floppy disks can only be 1.4mb
and cd can only be 700mb
phonelines can only go upto 56k
"coz moores law has run out"

and yet
4tb beat old harddrives 1000x
microSD beats floppy by 350,000x
blueray beats CD by 71x
i9 cpu with 64bit 24 cores and 32 threads
1gbit fibre internet

[vapourminer]

500 gb its nothing for today tecnology. So imagine in ten years more where we can be. Maybe in our wrist in a smatwatch. Your wallet and the whole bitcoin core in your wrist.

Technology has changed quite a lot since 2009.

Yes, 500GB is nothing for today. And following Moore's Law, in ten years we should have devices holding up to 16TB (doubling every two years) that are as common as 500GB devices are today.

I mean, you can have a laptop today with more RAM (64GB) than a hard disk in 2009. Advances in technology have been amazing.

i have a 2 tb nvme drive just for games. so i honestly cant see storage capacity for something as important as verifying that your stash is actually yours as being an issue.

anyway my working copy of the blockchain is on a dedicated 1 tb nvme. it gets backed up several different ways (both on and off site) as having a local copy of the full chain is that important to me.

[larry_vw_1955]

i remember the moores law of the 1990's

i had a desktop. it had 3.5gb hard drive and 256mb ram and cost $1000

my first computer was about $620 and only had 8mb of ram. and 200mb hdd. i got it from this mail order place that was advertising in a computer magazine. i must have call that guy a million times before i finally bought it. kind of disappointed with their shipping though. two big boxes full of these pink styrofoam peanuts and it looked like they just threw my 14 inch ibm monitor in there like a basketball shot. cord unravelled and all.   i immediately installed windows 3.1.

funny thing is i don't think machines today really are much more responsive than back then. sure they can run more powerful apps but for typing an email or something. you don't need that. had to save up that $620 too by the way.

[franky1]

my point was.
when people shout moores law and say we are at the end

i recall when i was last at the edges of the end of moores law in computing over 25 years ago
.. until it wasnt the end and life moved on

[LoyceV]

@LoyceV If you think that everyone should download and verify the blockchain on their own and not rely on 3rd party downloads may I ask why you are compressing it?

Because I can I mean, why not? I believe in options and freedom to choose.

Are you planning on releasing this

I just did

and why?

Because BADecker asked for it.

I do not think you have bad intentions I just fear that newbies or people that do not know the risks might download this thinking it is a good thing to do and is normal.

If someone downloads 397 GB without knowing what he's doing, he can't be helped.

I think you should probably include a warning saying that this is not normal and you should download & verify the blockchain yourself.

There is a warning:

If I want to start my own full node, is it better to simply let the client update on its own?

Yes.

I guess for someone who wants to look around the software with a full blockchain but not use it for integrity could find a use for downloading the entire blockchain from a quicker source then direct but that is all I can think of.

It may not even be faster. Bitcoin Core downloads from multiple sources, and some of them are probably much closer than my server.