Topic: Blockchain Download Time (Read 393 times)

3 Answers. Assuming you have solid 2 megabytes per second download speed, it would take around 20 hours just to download them. In practice, this takes much longer, as your computer will verify every block individually, which takes some time.

Just wait a week.  Once it's downloaded, the updates (a new block every 10 minutes) are very small and fast.  If it gets bigger, you'll need to get a bigger disk!

Really it taking too much time...  I have only 100 kbps download speed show more than week download time. now I'm thinking what will happen whne lockchain reach to 1 TB . What will happen to my pc.

You don't pay to download it.  I used an Amazon Web Services server instance for the download.  You need to pay for that.  I posted the costs for it above.  If you're using a PC on your home broadband it won't cost anything.

I tried to download it before. It keeps on getting rejected and I just notice that the space isn't enough. An excellent information sir, I'd be very careful with it's infos soon. One question though, did you pay or were there any payments done for you to completely downloaded it? Thank you.

Well, it was worth a shot!  Maybe if it's that, or the end of Bitcoin...

In an altcoin?  Sure.  There are many that have already done so.

In Bitcoin?  That's a hard fork.  To accomplish it you need agreement from an overwhelming majority of all users, merchants, miners, exchanges, wallets, etc.  Getting that many people to agree overwhelmingly on such a change isn't going to happen.  It wasn't even possible to get an overwhelming majority to agree to increase the block size from 1 megabyte to 2 megabytes after 7 years of discussion, debate, argument, and attempts.  Attempting to fork with less than an overwhelming majority results in an altcoin "airdrop" ("Bitcoin Cash" was a hard fork without an overwhelming majority).

I don't think there has been a successful hard fork change to "Bitcoin" since Satoshi left.  I doubt there ever will be.

Here's something to think about...

Is the purchase of a coffee or pizza really an important or risky enough transaction that every full node should be required to store that transaction FOREVER?  If not, then why is it so important that people be able to make such a purchase on-chain?

Why not make a block every minute?  Make the reward 1.25 bitcoin so you still average 12.5 bitcoin every 10 minutes.  You still get 12.5 bitcoin every 10 minutes but you get 10 times the number of transactions confirmed.

Why stop at a minute, make a new block every 10 seconds, every second, again with a proportional reward to maintain the average of 12.5 bitcoin every 10 minutes?  could get a *lot* more transactions processed and more quickly.

Excellent information again, thank you.  Yes, I did notice those options when playing with the core but didn't fully understand them.  So you could set blockmintxfee to quite a high value to only accept transactions with large fees.  Very interesting, so it's the core that determines what transactions are available to miners, hence no setting for it on BFGMiner.  So if you are using someone else's core, you have to go with their settings.  I suppose this goes back to the early days when every miner would have their own core and the core (bitcoind) did the mining.

Bandwidth in, i.e. downloading the blockchain, is free.  Data transfer out is free for the first 1GB then $0.09 per GB after that.  Which would be expensive running as a full node if someone downloaded the entire blockchain of 172GB, would be ~ $15 every time (not sure if the transfer is measured in bits or bytes which could make a significant difference).  You wouldn't have any transfer out if you were using it privately, i.e. not accepting incoming requests/connections.  Plus, I believe data transfer between servers on the AWS network is free.

You pay for the storage.  I used 200GB of storage which is charged at $0.116 per GB per month, which equates to $23.20 for the month.

The server instance is one of their lower specs and costs $0.0264 per hour, which equates to (roughly) $19 a month.

The beauty of the AWS instances is that you can start and stop them at any time.  You only pay for what you use.  I have used this one for a few days just to download the blockchain and have a play with it.  In 5 1/2 days it's cost me $3.53 for the instance and around $5 for the storage.  My transfer out was 4.6GB, costing 42 cents (I was only accepting incoming connections for a few hours).  It's on a very good network too, so you should get good connectivity.

If you are mining in a mining pool, then the pool is selecting the transactions and building the blocks.  Then they just hand off the block header (or, more specifically, the partially hashed header called the midstate) to your software for you to complete the hashing on. In that case, the pool is probably running custom software to build the block headers.

If you are solo mining, then your mining software is probably getting its block headers from Bitcoin Core using a getwork API call.  In that case, Bitcoin Core has the transaction selecting algorithm coded into it. I haven't done any mining, so I don't know how configurable that algorithm is.  You do have a few command line options when starting up Bitcoin Core:  

• -blockmaxweight=        Set maximum BIP141 block weight (default: 3000000)
• -blockmaxsize=            Set maximum block size in bytes (default: 750000)
• -blockprioritysize=        Set maximum size of high-priority/low-fee transactions in bytes (default: 0)
• -blockmintxfee=       Set lowest fee rate (in BTC/kB) for transactions to be included in block creation. (default: 0.00001)

Correct.  Assuming there aren't any significant changes to the protocol to allow more on-chain transactions, eventually Bitcoin will either die or it will develop high enough transaction fees that nobody will be using it for small value on-chain transactions.


Lightning Network is one of a few off-chain solutions to allow a large number of off-chain Bitcoin based transactions.  Another off-chain solution is Bitcoin based accounts with services such as Coinbase or BitPay.  Each has their own benefits and issues, and each will probably find use in various circumstances.

Do the mining programs automatically select the transactions with the highest fees?  Been looking at BFGMiner but didn't notice a configuration for this or any mention of it in the README.


Just been reading some very worrying articles about very high bitcoin transaction fees:

http://uk.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-payment-mining-fees-hit-new-high-2017-12
m/2017/12/19/big-transactions-fees-are-a-problem-for-bitcoin.html]https://www.c[Suspicious link removed]m/2017/12/19/big-transactions-fees-are-a-problem-for-bitcoin.html

...meaning no-one is going to use it to buy coffee or pizza.  One of the articles mentions Lightning Network with instant transactions and low fees, which to me looks very interesting.

Thanks all.  Good info!  I would like to keep a full node to help the network.  Just tinkering for now!

Correct.


FALSE.

Running a node does not make you any more or less reliant on other nodes for broadcasting your transactions.


Correct.




What balances?  What are you talking about?  Why wouldn't you know what your own balance is?

That certainly sounds like a load of nonsense.


This isn't a question about downloading the blockchain.  This is a question about storing the blockchain. Did you even read this thread before posting your nonsense?

Actually it has. You do not have to run a node to be able to transact. But you will be highly reliant on nodes that your wallet uses for broadcasting your transactions to the network. As a medium and large size business you would like to be able to control when you broadcast your txs, be sure that wallets do not falsify your balances, there are no MIM attacks. So having a node, thus, downloading blockchain is quite necessary.

You don't. The block files are pretty useless after you've verified them and have gotten the chainstate and other essential information. If your computer can verify its legitmacy, there is no problem throwing them away. You could have problems when importing addresses, etc. None of the potential problems actually affect the security; could just cause some inconvenience.
Yes. If everyone pruned their blockchain, then it would be a huge problem. Since the wallet prune itself as you get more blocks, no one would ever see the entire history if that were to happen. And yes, it would compromise the security greatly in that case. IMO, pruning is just for people who wants to run Bitcoin Core and to support the network, not really that much as to helping the network (debatable but thats my opinion).

This is not possible unless there is a fork and we change the block weight or block size.

Right now, if too many transactions are sent, then the excess transactions that don't fit into the next block must wait until a later block. Those that want fast confirmation of their transaction therefore increase their transaction fee to get into the next block.  The transactions with lower fees are then left waiting a VERY long time to confirm.  Eventually, people that aren't willing to wait abandon the Bitcoin blockchain and use some other method for making their transactions.  Those other methods may or may not Bitcoin off-chain transactions (such as Lightning Network or Account based services like Coinbase)


No.  They just wait for later blocks.


You need to have received and processed the entire blockchain if you want to be 100% certain that you have not been fed any false information about the current state of the UTXO. However, you do not need to have stored/kept that entire history.  You only need to keep the UTXO.


Yes. That would be a problem.  Fortunately, there are many of us that WANT and are willing to store the entire blockchain for various reasons. If you are able to store the entire blockchain and you want the entire blockchain (or you just want to be able to help other new users by supplying the entire blockchain), then you are welcome to do so and we appreciate your willingness to do so.  If you are unable to , or you do not want to, then we can manage without you.

Thanks all for the very helpful replies.  I noticed the prune option but I wasn't sure about it (being very new to this).  My understanding was that you needed the full blockchain for maximum integrity.  What if everyone pruned their blockchain, would that mean there wouldn't be any full copies of the blockchain?!  Wouldn't that be a problem?

Yes, Jet Cash, I remember seeing an option to state the data directory.  That would be very handy to have the .bitcoin directory on a SSD.  Initially I was thinking you would just need the blocks and the chainstate data but it makes sense, and is a lot easier, simply to copy the entire directory.

Right.  I'm very new to this.  I wasn't thinking about the size of the chain so much as the size of the blocks.  What if there's tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of new transactions per block (as there will be when everyone starts using bitcoin on a regular basis!).  All those transactions in one block of 1MB?

I've got 3 copies of the blockchain ( plus the associated files and wallet data), and I run 2 nodes.

I copied the directory onto an SSD, and gave that to a new installation of Core under Ubuntu. It asked me for the directory address, and when I replied, it went ahead and veried the copied chain, and synchronised it. It even gave me the correct info in the wallet.

I'm impressed with core, it seems to be extremely stable, it even runs under Windows without any problems.