Topic: blockchain size (Read 1218 times)

Won't ever be an issue:


Year   Average Cost Per Gigabyte
2014   $0.03
2013   $0.05
2010   $0.09
2005   $1.24
2000   $11.00
1995   $1,120
1990   $11,200
1985   $105,000
1980   $437,500


Cost of 2.5 GB drive in 1996: $440
Cost of 200 GB drive in 2005: $140
Cost of 2 TB (2,000 GB) drive in 2015: >$100 (NewEgg)
Cost of 2 PB (2,000 TB) drive in 2035: ?? Probably>$100 (some future online website)

Data from: http://www.statisticbrain.com/average-cost-of-hard-drive-storage/

Here's a great graphic that lets you visualize the future scalability of bitcoin if (hopefully) we get our shit together and start raising the blocksize in time to not bloat the network and start challenging the banksters and their centralized business and potentially ruin them by deprecating them:

the average user does not have to download the entire blockchain to use bitcoin. specifically miners and other businesses/technical users that need the full blockchain.
Furthermore there should be a backup plan in case the blockchain size becomes unmanageable.

It can currently grow at a max speed of 1mb / 10 min.............  It's not expoential...

You think wrong! The block size does not matter. From this it does not depend on the size of the entire blockchain. Each unit will not be completely filled to capacity. Not yet a very large number of transactions.

Under the current operation of bitcoin, the blockcain won't grow by more than 52.6 gigabytes per year.  That means it would take 38 years to fill a 2 terabyte drive.  I'm confident that typical storage devices will exceed 2 terabytes by orders of magnitude in far less than 38 years.  As such, "exponential blockchain growth" won't be "problematic" in the next half-century unless the protocol is modified to allow exponentially larger blocks.


I never said anything about anybody being a "god".  As far as I'm concerned Satoshi made several mistakes in the design and programming of bitcoin.  You are setting up a strawman argument that does not impress me.

I only pointed out that the concept of "only big companies will be mining" was an intended design feature of bitcoin and not a "problem" that needs to be fixed. This isn't just due to blocksize. The market forces designed into the bitcoin protocol are set up such that cheaper access to certain resources (electricity, cooling, equipment housing, maintenance services, efficient hashing equipment) result in higher profit margins. Those higher profit margins allow larger companies with access to those resources to increase the mining difficulty enough to drive smaller operations without access to the cheap resources out of business.  This naturally leads to a consolidation in the mining of bitcoins until the vast majority of mining is handled by only a few big companies.

If you don't like this, then you'll want to consider looking into (or designing) altcoins, because this is in the nature of bitcoin's design.  It isn't going to change, you'll never get enough consensus to redesign bitcoin's proof-of-work system in a way that eliminates these market forces.


There is nothing about bitcoin's current blockchain size (or its size in the future under the current protocol) that would get in the way of decentralization.


I never said anything about "a large blockchain" being a design feature or intended behavior.  Once again you are setting up a strawman argument that does not impress me.

I said that consolidation in mining is a design feature and intended behavior.  This is not wrong.


Where did I say anything about "max-out storage resources"?  I'm pretty sure that I pointed out that bitcoin is NOT maxing out storage resources.  I pointed out that the blockchain is growing MUCH slower than the ridiculous predictions of the video posted in the OP.  Please take your strawman argument and go away.


I guess that all depends on what you consider to be "large".  As far as I'm concerned, any blockchain that grows slower than the rate of typical storage devices is not "large".

Max Blockchain growth with 1 mb block are 52 gb pr year. With 20 mb block it is 1040 gb.

I guess the resistance in increasing block size to soon has something to do with this increase. Buying time to solve it properly.

Could be the biggest file ever created in some years if they let it grow.

Satoshi already considered this problem in the paper he wrote. He said if the blockchain's size ever becomes a serious problem then unnecessary data about transactions that are fully spent can be deleted, or "pruned". Most of the nodes in the network could mine without using the whole blockchain.  Only a few nodes are needed to store every transaction ever made in the whole blockchain.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

I think thats not a bigger problem, as long as technology always upgrade our problems especially about bitcoin could be solved, i think people that working on bitcoin have been thinking about it.
And if there is a problem they are gonna looking for the solution,this is one and only for future of bitcoin.

Franky, that is exactly what I was thinking.  Imagine this, all you whipper snappers: my first computer had a hard drive the size of... 300 mb.  And that was pretty good at the time.  Technology is growing so fast that it might not be something we really need to worry about.

Plus, there are so many talented individuals in the bitcoin community that I am confidant a solution for such a simple problem could be reached even without technology advancing.

Bitcoin is not a bubble.



controlled supply ... hard coded ... can not be modified.

sometimes i think people here is too overshadowed by this new technology and the idea they will become very rich, that they don't stop to think in some eventually future problems!

They think this is some kind of religion they follow blindly (fantoms never was good) and the ones whom makes questions must be burned!!!

although it is likely that there are zero day exploits that can be utilized to attack bitcoin, it is very unlikely that enough of these exploits exist, separate or together, that compromise the entire bitcoin network or blockchain.

thank you for this info. I will read it.

While the predictions are totally useless (simple extrapolation), it's important to note that blockchain (size) growth depends a lot on transaction activity. Transaction activity correlates with price swings (mostly upward ones). Therefore it is possible that we might see periods of (super-)exponential blockchain growth that might be problematic if a significant part of the established infrastructure isn't prepared to cope with it.



We should not think of Satoshi as a god, who is free from any fallacy. It is generally desirable to keep the blockchain size as small as possible to keep decentralization high. Describing a large blockchain as a "design feature" or "intended behavior" is wrong, because it's not the goal of Bitcoin to max-out storage resources - a large blockchain is (currently) simply a necessity for Bitcoin to work securely.

ya.ya.yo!

There is no problem with the size of blockchain. Soon, each smartphone will be a couple of terabytes of memory.
And what have mining. It is not necessary to store the whole story. Bitcoin can produce without it.

It's not a problem, it's a cost of decentralization. If you want a full copy of the permanent, unalterable ledger, you need to use some resources.

not another argument..

ok short version.. just 5 years ago everyone was saying 500gb was a large hard drive size.. now retailers sell 4TB and higher..

so in 5 years time multiple TB hard drives will be the norm..

going back further, just 15 years ago a 3.2GB hard drive was the more than average size...

so dont worry about data bloat. as technology will grow faster than the need.
infact you can now get something the size of a postage stamp that can store 60-80 years of data, at current bloat growth...


so relax. it wont cost the earth to hold the blockchain. and if the transactions do grow.. new upgrades WILL be available..

so lets lock this thread and merge it with the other 30 scare-mongering threads

According to that video (posted December of 2013):

"the blockchain will easily reach fifty gigabytes within a year and two hundred fifty gigabytes within two years"

Actual blockchain size in December 2014?  Twenty-four gigabytes. (less than half of the fifty gigabytes that the video said it would "easily reach")

Actual blockchain size six months later in June 2015? Thirty-four gigabytes.

It has grown 10 gigabytes in the past 6 months, do you really think it will "easily reach two hundred fifty gigabytes" in the next 6 months?

Now that we've established that the video is making predictions that are complete nonsense, lets move on to your concern that "in the near future only big companies will be mining it".

You ask "How to fix this problem in the future?"

What problem?  What's wrong with only big companies mining it?  That's exactly what it was intentionally designed for.  From the very beginning it was specifically intended that eventually only big companies would be mining it.  This isn't a "problem" that needs to be fixed.  This is a "design feature" and the "intended behavior" of the system.  If you didn't realize that, then the only thing that needs to be "fixed" is your understanding bitcoin.

Here is what Satoshi had to say about it himself (bold emphasis added by me):

There are some proposals for that, check it out:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/storing-utxos-in-a-balanced-merkle-tree-zero-trust-nodes-with-o1-storage-101734

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ultimate-blockchain-compression-w-trust-free-lite-nodes-88208

http://utxo.tumblr.com/

Also take a look at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability