Topic: Bitcoin 0.12 release - page 4. (Read 11264 times)

No worries, I'm running 2 full nodes :-) and will run them until blockchain size is 5TB.

But seriously, I think the old nodes, the ones people run at home on their DSL connections will stay full nodes for a long time.

I noticed Classic nodes are increasing quite a bit, they are probably run on VPS so pruning might be important in those environments.

If larger block size is adopted (I hope it is not), the blockchain size and bandwidth might force the little guys out. 

Does it make any sense at all to think about paying folks running full nodes (with or without all old blocks) even if they aren't mining?

Keep a copy on a USB stick.

How many nodes do we need to satisfy initial syncs?  https://bitnodes.21.co/ indicates there are over 5,800 right now.  That seems like plenty for sure.  As pruning becomes more popular, who's job is it make sure the number doesn't dwindle too low?

What would happen if managed to lose every copy of the old blocks?

Yes, just upgrade it.  Depending on what you mean by "serve the network" you'd want to avoid turning pruning on. 

I run a full node now on 0.11.2, is it possible to upgrade to 0.12 RCx and still serve the network?

In the future Core will let you choose to "donate x GB to the network", and then you'll store a random range of historical blocks. Then nodes doing an initial sync will have to search out nodes that have the blocks they want from among these nodes storing chunks of the historical chain. It's a bit like how BitTorrent works.

Correct, some nodes with the entire blockchain will always need to exist.

If everyone ran in pruned mode then would that be a problem?  How would a new node catch up from the beginning?  I'm sure it's just that I am missing the obvious point.  Sorry to be such a dummy.

Maybe the idea is at least a few nodes will always keep the full history?  I am willing to if that helps.

Not sure what would cause this, but you would get a better response by posting on the github issue tracker. Or rather watch the issue thread that gmaxwell opened for you here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/7494

I've been testing out 0.12.0rc3 in pruned mode, and have run into the following error message when restarting Bitcoin Core: "last wallet synchronisation goes beyond pruned data. You need to -reindex (download the whole blockchain again in case of pruned node)"

To reproduce:
0.) Start from scratch, deleting the entire Bitcoin data directory if it exists (leaving no wallet file or blockchain data).
1.) Install Bitcoin Core
2.) Create Bitcoin data directory if it doesn't exist, create bitcoin.conf, set "prune=550" without quotes
3.) Run Bitcoin Core
4.) After you've verified, say, 100,000 blocks, close Bitcoin Core. Wait until the warning window to not shutdown/restart computer completely closes.
5.) Run Bitcoin Core again, let it verify some more, close it again.
6.) Rinse and repeat step 5...

At some point, I get the above error message on starting Bitcoin Core.

I don't know what exactly is causing this, but if you're like me and you've verified a large amount of blocks and then you're told that you have to start completely over, you'll probably be pissed.

This error message is not new, as a related fix for this kind of error, when converting non-pruned nodes to pruned nodes was made here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/6345

While it's obviously easy to reproduce this error *if* you try plopping an *already existing* wallet.dat file into a pruned node data directory and then running Core -- that's not what I've been experiencing. I've been seeing this error with a brand new wallet.dat that was created from scratch *alongside* a fresh, pruned node.

Edit: If it's a brand new node from scratch, it seems that if you delete the wallet.dat after getting this error, a brand new one will be created, and the blockchain will continue to sync from where it left off, so at least there's that, though, it's still a bug.

Everyone who has been working on Core still works on Core. No one jumped from Core to Classic.

If you want names:

• Wladimir J. van der Laan
• Luke-Jr
• Pieter Wuille
• Jorge Timon
• MarcoFalke
• Suhas Daftuar

To name a few.

So who is currently developing core considering those who are working on Classic?

No, that's not the purpose of HD wallets (they provide one-time-only wallet backups and/with "master" public keys)

Shouldn't this problem be solved with an HD wallet? In this case, it should be high on the priorities of core devs. I didn't know many people use bitcoin core as their wallet.

Yes, -prune enable.

You decide how much space is dedicated to the blockchain.

That'd work, though if I were you I'd just store the whole blockchain. At least on my machines, rescans tend to be a lot quicker than syncing.

In the future Core maybe needs something like:

- You keep the last n levels of ancestor transactions for each UTXO. Electrum servers do this. Then you can almost always rescan, but still save quite a bit of space (though the savings are unpredictable).
- Rescan using only the portion of the block chain that Core is keeping with the prune=. So if you do prune=20000 or something you'll probably always be able to usefully rescan.
- The ability to rescan by relying on an archival node (maybe one you trust) and bloom filters. Then you can run just one archival node and point your other nodes to it. Note that this is a massive privacy issue if you're relying on random public nodes.

In the peer list, it will show up as 0.12.0.

I'll definitely wait until then. Thanks as always bro!

Uh, no -rescan? So, also no -wallet? I have a few different wallets. wallet1.dat, wallet2.dat, wallet3.dat

When I switch wallets, I usually have to shutdown Core, then start it with a -rescan while pointing to the other wallet.

What I could try to do, is make several separate folders or directories of core with each wallet, then prune each one. So for 3 different wallets, I'll be running 3 separate pruned nodes. Could also be separate machines (virtual or real.)