Topic: Block chain size/storage and slow downloads for new users (Read 228612 times)

bootstrap is the best way to download btc. or an image of the roaming folder can do it much faster for the core version.

Close to 30GB?? Did you mean 40

I personaly use Electrum but the down side it is storing the data on remote servers if i rememmber right. I have used to have free space and i installed the original Bitcoin wallet but i needed to install it. This is my opinion.

It should get compacted, it is shocking to see how big btc wallet is getting with all the confirmations and blockchain in it. Now getting closer to 30GB. I stopped using this due to this fact and crashing when trying to download or update. Moved to Bither wont ever go back to qt main wallet unless I really need to and so far Bither is been a kick ass wallet.

Pruning has been implemented for the next version. It would help in the reduction of blockchain size. Bitcoin needs more geographically decentralised nodes than centralised one even though more nodes would mean that it would be harder for sybil attacks to be successful. Synchronization time is reduced significantly with the introduction of header-first synchronization.

should bitcoin have an update to compact the blockchain?
even if the HDD become cheaper in the future, it won't help for synchronizing, that is horrible - less people uses qt = less security.

Indeed, my bandwidth is unlimited and disk space is not a problem , so should i say bandwidth is pretty cheap and does not matter? but i don't have SSD drives to suffer less with the terrible leveldb Bitcoin Core uses

[sarcasm]
Bandwidth's pretty much cheap now; I have unlimited 100 mb/sec. Lets increase the required bandwidth because its only waiting a couple of minutes longer.
[/sarcasm]

I get fed up with the "I'm alright Jack cos I have a 10 tonne tower of hard drives." attitude. It's not a problem FOR YOU and it's cheap FOR YOU and you can do anything you like to your computer because you don't have an IT department in your bedroom.

There are a number of issues that I think get rolled into one "its too big" which really shouldn't be.

A client doesn't require a lot of CPU or memory or disk space to confirm transactions or signatures. The hardware requirements are pretty much the same now as they were when Satoshi had his brainwave. This aspect can be achieved on Raspberry Pi and even some micro controllers. You don't need huge clusters of supercomputers either now or in the future to confirm transactions and signatures.

To be able to confirm transactions and sigs, however, you need to be able to trust your current information about the blockchain. This is where things are ballooning.

The Bitcoin Core software is naive, in software terms, in that assumes the host computer is for the sole purpose of running the application. It requires this, not for operation, but for pre-processing the block-chain only. It will max out bandwidth trying to catch up, hammer the CPU to verify blocks and use a huge chunk of a disk drive without options to move the data or offload any or all of those facets. The software needs to be more cooperative and smarter in the way it stores and reassembles the block chain and it is my opinion that bittorrent, as has been adopted by the games industry for large scale distributions for this exact reason,  is the way forward there where the data can be downloaded directly to a NAS, piece by piece in reverse order with the option of how far back you want to go.

I also see that there is a real need for a ACID compliant database - after all, this is money we are talking about  - which would relegate to the history books, the godawful verifying every time you start the application (SQLite is the first choice here, I think). The latter would also enable adhoc verifications rather than the completely linear one of the hash-table method. (e.g. pick tx 1, 9 and 50 produce a hash then ask another client what they make it).

I would like to see these kinds of things. Perhaps not exactly, but in that general direction. All I see at the moment though is less and less hardware being capable of running the software and more and more centralization to those who own the infrastructure. The end result will be online web services that you access through a browser and the banks will be those services.

We
I get your point about the blockchain growing too large to easily work  with  but I also agree with the other guy who said sooner or later its going to be infeasible for Everyone to have the whole blockchain and I hope the lead developers are close to  a solution  so  future users will have the option of storing a certain x amount of blockchain
The most recent 5 or 10GB etc would be fine imo or maybe 2 versions of the official client so power users can still run their own "bank" if they want to and a lite version similar to multibit that would enable secure use  without the whole chain

At the moment I don't think it's a problem   (42GB) but Bitcoin is growing exponentially and they're will have to be lite options for half of the world that don't have the latest cpu and terabytes of storage and a fibre optic Internet connection to get it all in a reasonable amount of time

The more Bitcoin takes off the more people will be looking at new  solutions to the problem but there are solutions already and perhaps we are worrying about this too much at the moment since  there is already a lot of alternative wallets to store your Bitcoin even today without needing the whole chain

Thanks for sharing this useful info. It's very helpful for me.

Yeah, I kind of agree. Standard HDD in normal desktop computers is lager than 1 TB, and for laptops there are even 2TB SSDs (even if expensive).

The technology moves forward as does Butcoin.

I agree. The mindset that tries to fill technology as it arrives should be resisted. We should be viewing this as a minimal resource system so that you don't necessarily need expensive 1st world infrastructure to participate.

My opinion is probably on the other extreme to those that think throwing TB of disk space is a non-issue but my sentiment is valid, I think. We should be trying to put our energies into making Bitcoin resource agnostic, as far as it can be, and have design goals around low footprint, low bandwidth with the aim of being able to run full nodes over things like radio. The current mindset of a "huge blockchain is OK" is an anathema to a decentralized system pushing more and more control into infrastructure-rich people and societies and I would like to see a reversal of this.

I was dealing with bitcoin issues from an old linux laptop of mine with a HDD of 80 GB and I would like to do other things as well. I consider the (now) 41 GB even on a 500 GB disk a lot. I have other files to store apart from my tiny Bitcoin stash.

Also, now with the proposed gradual block size increase the more transactions happen, the larger the blocksize will be. I wonder how long this "be your own bank" can be sustainable before some other measures need to be introduced that wouldn’t require everyone to hold the full blockchain, just say the last X GB.

Exchange SSD for HDD and you will see plenty of "new" hardware that is limited to 100odd GB of disk space[1]. My laptop (not its not running a full node) "only" has 240 GB and with a collections of different ISOs and other large files I can easily imagine that bitcoin core would not fit any longer over the years. That beeing said, I dont see any reason to run a full node on my laptop, but others might see this differently.

[1] Hi, apple.

i just checked the bitcoin folder and its currently  41.8GB   

It makes no differnce to me as i have a few 1TB drives


what laptop would 30 GB  be a third  of the hdd thesedays ? i rememeber trying to buy a replacement 120GB HDD about 2-3 years ago
and the people in the shop laughed and said we dont sell those anymore (the smallest they had was 320 or 500GB even back then )

That could easily be 1/3 of his total space on a laptop. I do understand what you're saying though, and as the blockchain size increases we will continue to see larger amounts of storage offered cheaper. 

how is 30 odd GB a lot of space ? what age of computer do you have ?

I think there are a lot of students around and there money is an issue. Plus, if you need some special hardware for bitcoin (e.g. 1TB HDD) then it can be somewhat "exclusive" (In terms of running a full node, of course). As said, I stopped my full node from my laptop when the blockchain went around 30GB-ish. For me, that is a lot of space.  If I can't keep it up 24/7 (or close), not much point anyway.

This isn't much of an issue. Most people at least would have I3 or I5, if they don't have that, SPV clients would be a better way to go. But still, a Pentium g3258 is quite powerful while being under 80USD. The main problem is that he is talking about using a external HDD which may be a bottleneck and we don't really know his internet speed yet.