Overstock CEO Calls Bitcoin Code "Slop"

[kokojie]

20 gigs is not that much any more...but still quite a bit.....this is really quite scary.....

I used a mac se 30 circa 1989 and and lived happily with 20 megs and heard of a mythical 1 gig HD that blew my mind at the time

20 gig is not much, but 20 gig AND growing daily, is VERY scary. Next year we will reach 30+ gig

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[DeathAndTaxes]

20 gig is not much, but 20 gig AND growing daily, is VERY scary. Next year we will reach 30+ gig

Which is less than the rate of storage growth and storage already has a huge heads start.  Everything is relative, if your $150 SSD hold 50% more capacity next year and the blockchain is 50% larger are you really falling behind?  On a larger scale when the blockchain is too large to fit on your 256GB SSD you probably will be able to buy a 16TB SSD for less than what your current drive costs. 

Still the reality is no matter what happens, or what changes are made to any crypto-currency, your average casual user is not going to run a full node.  They just aren't.   I mean if you cut it 75% they still aren't going to.  This isn't to say improvements and efficiency to the protocol shouldn't be considered but the reason shouldn't be so Joe Sixpack can download the blockchain because he isn't going to regardless of what you do.  If Bitcoin someday has 50 million users I would imagine 99% are using SPV clients, eWallets, or some other "lite" alternative.  Still 1% still mean 500K full nodes and that is more than sufficient to support the network.   For a business like overstock 10GB per year in storage is not even a factor to consider.  Their email archive requirements (as a publicly traded company) are probably on the order of tens of TBs per year (and that is probably being conservative).

[vpitcher07]

20 gig is not much, but 20 gig AND growing daily, is VERY scary. Next year we will reach 30+ gig

Which is less than the rate of storage growth and storage already has a huge heads start.  Everything is relative, if your $150 SSD hold 50% more capacity next year and the blockchain is 50% larger are you really falling behind?  On a larger scale when the blockchain is too large to fit on your 256GB SSD you probably will be able to buy a 16TB SSD for less than what your current drive costs. 

The thing everyone seems to forget about is internet speed. My internet speed has not increased with the capacity of my harddrives (proportionally of course) - not even close. I'm barely hitting 1 MB/s and you'd have to assume the average household is probably less than that.. That's a lot of download time even for 20 Gigs.

[Peter R]

20 gig is not much, but 20 gig AND growing daily, is VERY scary. Next year we will reach 30+ gig

Which is less than the rate of storage growth and storage already has a huge heads start.  Everything is relative, if your $150 SSD hold 50% more capacity next year and the blockchain is 50% larger are you really falling behind?  On a larger scale when the blockchain is too large to fit on your 256GB SSD you probably will be able to buy a 16TB SSD for less than what your current drive costs.  

The thing everyone seems to forget about is internet speed. My internet speed has not increased with the capacity of my harddrives (proportionally of course) - not even close. I'm barely hitting 1 MB/s and you'd have to assume the average household is probably less than that.. That's a lot of download time even for 20 Gigs.

And if you had read D&T's second paragraph in addition to the one that you quoted, you'd have realized that he already addressed this:

Still the reality is no matter what happens, or what changes are made to any crypto-currency, your average casual user is not going to run a full node.  They just aren't.   I mean if you cut it 75% they still aren't going to.  This isn't to say improvements and efficiency to the protocol shouldn't be considered but the reason shouldn't be so Joe Sixpack can download the blockchain because he isn't going to regardless of what you do…

[farlack]

No one puts into perspective that hard drives will already have the blockchain on them in the future 

[Crindon]

[Zuminest]

I wonder what specifically he is referring to? I mean Bitcoin's code can't be all that bad. See how far we have come!

[Lethn]

I wonder what specifically he is referring to? I mean Bitcoin's code can't be all that bad. See how far we have come!

Well I have no idea either, but I'm not a programmer, I am aware that Bitcoin has a couple of issues and things that need stress testing like the whole 51% attack but it was stated that Satoshi himself was not a programmer and there were flaws being found regularly in his code, his idea was brilliant but it's obvious he released it open source so people could look at it and fix things rather than have everything all go horribly wrong in a closed source environment and have the experiment be a total failure.

I mean, look at what we can do with it now programmers who know their code have their hands on this, we've got decentralised social networks, a decentralised ebay in the works, dark wallet, more anonymous currencies to protect peoples' privacy. Once we get some proper designers to back up the programmers and create something that is user friendly the financial sector as it is now are going to be shitting themselves, every time I think of the possibilities I start losing sleep and want to work more on anything I'm doing lol it's great motivation.

[froggyfeels]

Let's keep in mind that Satoshi was a genius, great programmer

Nope...

Genius maybe, good programmer probably too but definitely not "great".
Also he secured his premine by developing on Windows only.

I didn't realize that on the Windows. I would still say he was great to get something implemented like bitcoin...but I get what you mean.

[Velkro]

not worth debating about
he is not computer scientist, he could hear smth, he can imagine smth, doesn't matter
hes doing good for Bitcoin thats important

[CoinMode]

I assume he must be referring to downloading the blockchain.  The blockchain size is growing at a fast rate.  It's also extremely impractical for most people to download a 20 gigabyte blockchain.  I couldn't imagine what the case will be when Bitcoin could be 100 gigabytes in a few years.

In a few years we will all have 100Mbit internet connections. Downloading the blockchain might take a day, and full nodes will likely get reimbursed for storing a copy of the blockchain once mining becomes unbeleivably profitable during the next boom to $10K 2Q/2015.

[zimmah]

20 gig is not much, but 20 gig AND growing daily, is VERY scary. Next year we will reach 30+ gig

Which is less than the rate of storage growth and storage already has a huge heads start.  Everything is relative, if your $150 SSD hold 50% more capacity next year and the blockchain is 50% larger are you really falling behind?  On a larger scale when the blockchain is too large to fit on your 256GB SSD you probably will be able to buy a 16TB SSD for less than what your current drive costs. 

Still the reality is no matter what happens, or what changes are made to any crypto-currency, your average casual user is not going to run a full node.  They just aren't.   I mean if you cut it 75% they still aren't going to.  This isn't to say improvements and efficiency to the protocol shouldn't be considered but the reason shouldn't be so Joe Sixpack can download the blockchain because he isn't going to regardless of what you do.  If Bitcoin someday has 50 million users I would imagine 99% are using SPV clients, eWallets, or some other "lite" alternative.  Still 1% still mean 500K full nodes and that is more than sufficient to support the network.   For a business like overstock 10GB per year in storage is not even a factor to consider.  Their email archive requirements (as a publicly traded company) are probably on the order of tens of TBs per year (and that is probably being conservative).

by that time you could probably store it on free/cheap cloud storage, however i'm not sure if you could/should trust a cloud node.

[vpitcher07]

I assume he must be referring to downloading the blockchain.  The blockchain size is growing at a fast rate.  It's also extremely impractical for most people to download a 20 gigabyte blockchain.  I couldn't imagine what the case will be when Bitcoin could be 100 gigabytes in a few years.

In a few years we will all have 100Mbit internet connections.

Absolutely not true. (Assuming you mean the US).

[creepzzin]

Then why doesn't he help in coding it, if the code is 'Slop'. People would rather complain than do something about it.

Ummm... Do you really think the CEO of Overstock has time to do that??

[percocet]

Well I call his web site "slop" 

[bEGPO cNuPTA]

I assume he must be referring to downloading the blockchain.  The blockchain size is growing at a fast rate.  It's also extremely impractical for most people to download a 20 gigabyte blockchain.  I couldn't imagine what the case will be when Bitcoin could be 100 gigabytes in a few years.

In a few years we will all have 100Mbit internet connections. Downloading the blockchain might take a day, and full nodes will likely get reimbursed for storing a copy of the blockchain once mining becomes unbeleivably profitable during the next boom to $10K 2Q/2015.

That is an incredibly optimistic prediction you have there

Hopefully you're right though. But even if your 10k target comes true I doubt anyone is getting reimbursed for storing the blockchain anytime soon.

[Harley997]

I assume he must be referring to downloading the blockchain.  The blockchain size is growing at a fast rate.  It's also extremely impractical for most people to download a 20 gigabyte blockchain.  I couldn't imagine what the case will be when Bitcoin could be 100 gigabytes in a few years.

In a few years we will all have 100Mbit internet connections. Downloading the blockchain might take a day, and full nodes will likely get reimbursed for storing a copy of the blockchain once mining becomes unbeleivably profitable during the next boom to $10K 2Q/2015.

That is an incredibly optimistic prediction you have there

Hopefully you're right though. But even if your 10k target comes true I doubt anyone is getting reimbursed for storing the blockchain anytime soon.

It would not be unreasonable for nodes to be compensated sometime in the future when TX volume gets heavy enough to support much higher TX fees per block then we see now.

[ThomasCrowne]

Doesn't most source code contain some degree of "slop"?

[DeathAndTaxes]

It would not be unreasonable for nodes to be compensated sometime in the future when TX volume gets heavy enough to support much higher TX fees per block then we see now.

That will probably never happen.  Try to think of a cryptographically secure way to compensate full nodes for actual support.   If I create 20,000 nodes and connect them to each other using minimal resources would I get most of the "node reward".  Proof of work, "works" because its something that can't be faked.

[ar9]

Pretty sure this is common knowledge.