Topic: Block chain size/storage and slow downloads for new users - page 22. (Read 228658 times)

UCE is basically a local wallet. It has less privacy as you log in and it has less security as the server might change its mind and grab your key today.

UCE does not work for services that require to take control over your money. If you want to put your money into the books of an exchange or on a long time bet, it has to be taken out of your control and into the control of the website. If you don't want to pay for the blockchain every time you change your mind on your bids, you have to also grant the service control over your wallet, making UCE impossible.

Basically UCE is only an option for a pure wallet app. Anything else needs to be a service with a classical web wallet on top.

If the service used UCE (User Controlled Encryption) then the results of a service takeover attack would (or could) be minimal.  The attacker could not obtain the BTC, and the user could, with effort, re-claim it.  In my understanding of things, blockchain.info wallet is basically of this type.

Interestingly, cloud storage and many other forms of data transmission and storage (e.g., messaging) are trivially and easily protected by these methods.  Brazil is on some kick to 'keep data local'.  This is absurd.  Data managed by UCE can be stored and transmitted across untrusted mediums safely and trivially.  There is a media blackout on mega.co.nz at this time, but the service they provide seems to be working well (and they take Bitcoin!)  I'm looking forward further developments by that organization.

In my opinion, a resistance to using UCE is attributable to about one thing and one thing only.  Namely, the provisioner of the service wants to, or needs to, have the option to compromise the data.

Imagine if all big online wallets are destroyed or taken by government.

What will become of btc?

How many coins, that are currently in circulation are stored on the cloud? 10% 20% 50% ?

With these talks of regulation - if they implement it, they will surely go all-in to force it on these online wallets and(!) exchanges.

yes its to big, it takes forever to download.

An issue which most people probably fail to consider is that there is a vast difference in the needs that the different participants in the ecosystem have.

For many of us, the cost of a bag of Doritos and some pot represent a fair fraction of our net worth.  (Ya, been there, done that.)

Others need a safe place to store blocks of value in the above $100k range.  A small fraction of our net worth can keep us going for years and a theft of it (say, from something like the Instawallet failure) would be infuriating but would impact our financial statement only in a negligible way.

For my part I consider Bitcoin to be a superior solution to such things as bank deposits and IRAs for protection against certain types of risk.  Currently at least.  Critically, I also consider a financial service provider to have the same sort of protections that I have by utilizing Bitcoin as a store of value in their operation, so even if I am not in full control or the certain fraction of my net worth that I may have on deposit with an off-chain provider, I am still enjoying some of the benefits that Bitcoin offers even for that...or would be if Bitcoin retains it's broadly distributed peer-2-peer nature at it's core infrastructure level.

It may sound dickish, but I don't see low net worth people as really needing an extreme heavy weight and solid financial solution (like high precision per-purchase representation in a globally distributed and mission critical ledger) very badly.  Sure, it would be great, but if it kills the more critical aspects of the solution via growth which forces the infrastructure into the waiting arms of the big players, it is something which can be and should be sacrificed.

Plenty here in the community believe that the path forward involves it supporting exclusively a flourishing exchange economy and are ambivalent, and often hostile, to the idea of Bitcoin as a store of wealth.  I would hope that the minority who take an active role in the actual engineering of the solution are a bit less absolutist and a bit more pragmatic than the more rabidly philosophical participants (cough..Jeff of BitPay...cough.)

Indeed.

Bitcoin is decentralized... the antithesis of bitcoin is really centralized websites and authorities.

… and get your money stolen or get LE easy access? Come on, the bitcoin idea is be your own bank. No third party risk should be acceptable for the more security aware people.

Link:

[ANN] Bitcoin blockchain data torrent
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ann-bitcoin-blockchain-data-torrent-145386

Just use a online wallet, blockchain, coinbase etc.

Not very clear of the technique details, but this function is attractive, thanks man.

What is incompatible with Windows 8?

gah, i cant download it
it uncompatible with windows 8 

I've always felt comfortable with this solution since I can keep balances at various like organizations which are affordable to lose.  A bulk of my BTC holding are in very deep storage of course.  Even I cannot easily get a hold of them much less anyone else.

If I feel uncomfortable with one organization I can easily move some funds to one which I trust more or who's policies I like better.  I've done this from time to time.

Going beyond this, larger organizations with a significant userbase can coordinate with each other such that they settle on the blockchain on a periodic basis (say, once per day.)  In this way, the transaction fee can be shared between many thousands of users.  The fee could become high enough to make it well worth solving a block at even a modest TPS rate.

Such a solution keeps the block chain light enough that it can be realistically maintained by private individuals scattered throughout the world.  That is the big win to an 'off-chain with Bitcoin backing' evolution of the ecosystem.  I see it as the best compromise to address the scaling issues as we move forward.

To summarize post above this one, when you deposit/withdraw money from the service (such as Mtgox), you do a blockchain transaction, but all money movements inside the service (in case of Mtgox it would be trades) are off blockchain, and therefore are very fast and free.

Beginners often get it wrong that the deposit address at MtGox is not their private stash of bitcoin at MtGox but merely their identifier to deposit but this address might send to arbitrary addresses without their balance being affected.
Equally if you deposit via a MtGox code you deposit bitcoin on your balance that does not touch the block chain.
Standard bitcoind does book keeping. If you tell bitcoind to book money from address a to address b, it does not send a transaction to the blockchain if a and b are both in the same wallet.
Redeem codes are a more complicated way to achieve this MtGox-internal booking from one person to the other. It's more complicated as the sender does not a priory know which MtGox user will get the value later on.

These are the current off-chain transactions. They have the problem of the user having to trust MtGox in my example but have the advantage that transactions that don't hit the chain are essentially free.

With micro transaction channels, you can take the third party risc out of the equation as "MtGox" would not need to actually have control over the users' money to make that happen. "A" could tie his update to grant MtGox more money to MtGox proofing that the money gets sent on to the right recipient "B".

What do you mean? Transaction = withdraw and a deposit. Did I miss something?

Let's not forget that a lot of applications have already started doing their transactions off the blockchain. The blockchain is only updated when coins are deposited and withdrawn.

Thanks for the explanation. Just downloaded it 

Hmmm. Thanks for the update. This is very interesting!

This question often comes up. I thought the reason was the old blk000x.dat files remaining from the pre-0.7.8 (not sure) version, and which can be safely erased - but it would be nice if a developer here could confirm and explain.

Edit: Here is a relevant quote from deepceleron: