Topic: Block chain size/storage and slow downloads for new users - page 9. (Read 228612 times)

In theory, you write code. In reality, you subvert bitcoin with treasonous statements such as this.

not sure about the multibit thing but i like to run the bitcoin qt core on my main computer 24/7 to help strengthen the network in my area and help other users near me download it faster ....

i like the fact that the bitcoin network is more powerful than the 500 top super computers  on the planet combined  and i intend to help  keep it that way if i can

i have  multibit on my laptop if i need to make a quick transaction somewhere too and this combination works well for me

OK, back on topic here...


Anyone?  Anyone?  Knowledge? Hypothesis?  Guesses?

I probably won't ever run Multibit, but being something of a hodler being able to predict what might happen in certain scenarios is kind of important to understand.

Smart man.  Many have found out the hard way what a mistake that is.


Only config I've ever seen is the modem in the house and what Viasat is calling the TRIA these days out on the dish.  Maybe my credit score is good enough for them.  It's up around 800 IIRC, but I don't pay much attention to it.  Anyway, it would not be a good idea for the maintance dude to come onto my property unannounced and start picking up things.  Or anyone's place in my area.  I don't think I know anyone who doesn't have guns around, and there are a fair number of tweakers.  They are smart enough to stay away from private property for the most part however.  It's kind of a survival of the fittest thing around here.


Oh so that explains my problems.  Thanks for the tip.  I'll borrow my nephew next time I need to requisition services, leave my AK47 at home, and not wear so many hand grenades strapped to my belt.


That's actually one of the main reasons I bought a place in town.  I used to run a server there, but at the end of the day there are still jurisdictional problems which make it somewhat like pissing into the wind.

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If I may beg you to dig deep into your well of knowledge one more time, would you suggest that I tell my 'installer/reseller support channel' that the reason I'd like them to give me a synchronous protocol on my beam is that I wish to run bitcoind?  I ask because my bank told me that they canceled my account because it was hooked to Coinbase and if I did anything Bitcoin related with any other accounts they would cancel those as well and drop me as a customer completely.

I'm thinking perhaps I should just say I wanna run a security cam.  --edit:  ...but I'm a little worried that since they staff their engineering dept with geniuses like yourself who they find on their tech support line, they may have the ability to recognize the port 8333 traffic and slap me for being naughty.

Just FYI, the only other option in consumer-land is a POTS modem, and the line is so bad I can barely talk on it half the time.  Never got more than 19,200 IIRC.  No cell tower in range and I'm 8 miles from the CO.  No line-of-sight to set up a radio link to anywhere interesting even from my own ridge line either.  I'd have to have at least one repeater to reach my place in town (about 12 miles away as the crow flys.)  I've got some shotguns though (...and not the old modem ones for anyone who remember's that technology.)


And for anyone who tries it, let us all know how that works out for you.  Even if you have to take some time off your busy schedule after being hired by the provider as senior engineering staff.

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And for those of you who design (or blather on about) two-factor authentication, note that not everyone is always in cell range.  I rarely am.

Dude, you are just a confirmation that Hughes does have a correct policy of treating all consumer-level users as either hicks or repeated TOS violators who burned all possible terrestrial ISP options in their location.

Anyway, for the people interested in the satellite ISPs the intelligent user plan is two point:

1) learn a bit about the specifics of the satellite technology so you don't sound like a vengeful hick with a shotgun,
2) escalate through the installer/reseller support channel.

Edit: I don't want to play thread bump games with tvbcof, so I'm going to edit this message.

Bingo!

I don't want to drag this thread further away off-topic, so a few more observations of importance to those who have to use the wireless ISP:

3) large percentage of customers for those ISPs are high credit risk people. Many non-mobile wireless ISPs therefore sell and install rather strange configurations where all the expensive equipment is outdoors (easier to repossess after payment default) and only an elaborate but cheap power supply is indoor.
4) the same ISPs have seemingly strange fixation on selling "family" plans. It is their way to filter out dangerous loners with no wife/children. The "militarized loners" market segments are separately served through other outlets like military surplus stores.
5) even with very minimal technical skills you should be able to rent and configure yourself a remote server that you can locate in an well-connected area and minimize the bandwidth requirements for "the last miles to the cabin in the woods."

So, you told your Indian that you know your connection is asymetric and she was so impressed she turned you over to the NOC where you impressed the engineers so much that they hired you as a consulting staff engineer to get better service for the us hicks who have needs better served with symmetric data channels?  Wow.  You da man!

The lady told me that I was not supposed to know about port 80 on the defaultrouter.

You are perfectly correct that I do not know the various (theoretically) possible protocols available various layers on the satellite link.  I've not studied it very hard either because I'm not staying up nights waiting for any of them to be options for me.  Maybe you can work your magic there at headquarters for me?  But be quick because I am greatly looking forward to plain old T1 and have got the hardware upon which to build my router on the bench.

Yes, I did. I even got invited to Hughes' headquarters in Inglewood to discuss various technical options (not related to Bitcoin).

I think you understand that their consumer market are the proverbial "hicks" and it requires the approach appropriate to hicks. From your avoidance of the 3 technical questions I asked I'm going to assume that you actually don't have the required technical background for a productive discussion with their engineering and NOC staff.

At least T1 is fully symmetric, so you'll have no problems then.
 

Have you ever tried to talk to a satellite network provider for consumer class connectivity and got farther than some Indian telling you to re-boot your modem for the 15th time and clear your browser cache again?  Viasat had some horrible DHCP issues with very common routers when I first got the service some years ago.  I did packet captures and showed the problem on a forum, but that is as close as I was able to get to talking tech to anyone.  And it was mainly one other ordinary user who had some skilz.

I'll be switching to T1 this fall.  The phone company says they can do it.  We'll see.

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BTW, it occurs to me that if an Indian costs Hughes $0.50 and hour and I'm paying them $80/mo, they could keep me on the support line for literally days and still make a profit.  This is not unlike tossing rings at a carnival.  The amount you pay for a chance to win is more than the cost of the prize that you might get.

1) Have you talked to your satellite ISP about using SCTP/IP instead of TCP/IP?

2) Have you talked to your satellite ISP about using UDP/IP multicast in the downlink?

3) - - - - - - - about using MPEG system sub-channels in the downlink?

Dunno if it would help you or not, but I seem to be able to spend my BTC when the blockchain catches up to the point where the wallet was created and funded.  2011 in my cases, and of course the blockchain was much smaller at that point.  Then I can shut the client down.  The blockchain is now three times my total monthly data allowance on my satellite connection so being an actual useful participant in the so-called P2P solution is not very practical.

Some people think that satellite links add some magic diversity to the transmission backbone.  I happen to think this is nonsense given how tightly satellite connections are controlled (even though they are remarkably functional these days though fairly expensive) but whatever the case, you can at best run something like Multibit behind one which makes you more akin to headcount in a herd of sheep than an active participant in supporting the network.  As I see it.

BTW, I asked on another thread but nobody really knew the answer:  If there was a block chain fork and a war broke out between miners, could one make their own choices about which chain to follow in some way with Multibit?  Or is it just sort of hard coded that transaction attempts go into a nebulous cloud and results are put on whatever fork the server decides?  In other words, if there was a fork with unlimited block size and it formed the longest chain (for a while at least), could most Multibit transactions just get slapped on it without the user upgrading or being aware of what is happening?

I got a small question , why Bitcoin Core when it's Synchronizing with the network .. It download various files with small MB's like 150MB or something ... then if I download the torrent , the Bitcoin Core only read that 1 Single Boostrap.dat file ?
Does the Bitcoin client mix all the 150mb files together to get that .dat file of 20 GB or something ?

AAArgghhhhh.

I have waited for five days to get my wallet synchronized. Having qt.exe and appdata on a NAS. Once the wallet had two weeks to sync the wallet crashed due to full disk. I'm back to square one, now temporary put the wallet on an external USB drive to my gaming computer, hoping the wallet will synchronize faster...

Once this is done I'll move my coins to Multibit, hoping all this sync struggle will be over.

I noticed some slow down even with 8 connections of Core...

So I just built my new Hack Pro - it's a beast. And for the past two days now I've been trying to synchronize Bitcoin QT and I'm at about 10%.
I figured I'd see what Bitcointalk would say about it, and I wondered if anyone ever thought that there might be a time when the blockchain might get too ridiculously large, and what was my surprise to see this thread as the first thread listed when I logged in!

K, I'm going to go back and read it now.

New user downloads are on the brink of becoming much faster with version 0.9.4. It's out of development as of this morning in the Ubuntu/Linux PPA. It should be out soon for other versions.

Education is very important for the future of Bitcoin. I can see the industry trying to become simpler for all the Homer Simpsons of the world.

Too much.. Curious about where you believe other technologies began? Everyone understood them from day 1?

In essence, this is done by pruning, which will come very soon. Pruning does not group transactions to a concluding total which would be a change to the protocol that will very likely never come, as it assumes address reuse which should be reduced and not be encouraged. Pruning does though get rid of transactions that were already spent. You will be able to tell your node how many GB you want to spend on the bitcoin db and it will never exceed that. In turn, you will not be able to serve data for nodes that start up verifying data from the genesis block.

(highly controversial daydreaming: I would advocate for a rule that forbids spending of outputs that are older than a year, forcing users to at least move all their bitcoins once per year but I know this will never make it into the code. Benefit would be to get rid of lost coins that will become a problem once sha256 becomes weak and we need to transition to the next better thing. Most likely it will become weak gradually but at some point people will "mine" the biggest wallets out there instead of the next block. With the max age rule, we would get rid of the satoshi dice sins of unspendable satoshis and of all the "lost" coins. Satoshi would have to move his coins which would be a great event but we would only learn that he's still alive and nothing more. If coins are moved from output to output independently, this would not merge a thing. The transactions would also almost always qualify for no transaction fees.)

Thanks for your response. And your answer is much more informed then the previous one. And in a sense your right, but your explanation is going into how Bitcoins are transferred rather then my example of a solution to the blockchain length. Your forgetting that Bitcoin is just a program and therefor can be adapted to any new ideas that may come about. I am very well aware of how the Bitcoin program works and have been programming Java Bitcoin key generators for a long time. I understand all your points very well. That being said, I still don't see anything stopping the Bitcoin nodes from creating a "Summary" block of the address that have the money. And then either deleting everything since then, or just using that as the block for new nodes to start from. For example, rather then downloading 25 years of Bitcoin transactions, maybe my new computer node just download everything since the last "Summary" block. The only problem I see is that you will have a trust problem with that "Summary" block. Perhaps the miners can build the "Summary" block and then put a hash of that in the next transaction or something so that each new node can verify the "Summary" block. Maybe someone else out there can build upon this idea.

Actually, now that I think about it it's not that hard. The miners, every 4 years create a summary block as a special block in the blockchain with the info right in it. The nodes then each verify the "Summary" block and if one of the miners tried to create a false amount they would reject the "Summary" block. Therefore the Summary block would be verifiable by everyone and as a new node all you would do is start from that summary block and build from there. Rather then downloading 25 years of data. Now if you want to you still could maybe it could be an option on the client. And for the "Light" clients they just keep up to date from "Summary" to "Summary" rather then the whole thing.