Topic: Can the Block Chain get too big and make Bitcoin unworkable? - page 4. (Read 31510 times)

There are many Bitcoin clients. The "official" Bitcoin client (Bitcoin-qt) is not really official, and there are clients out there which already provide comparable features without requiring you download the blockchain - so no, not everyone needs to download the blockchain to use Bitcoin. It's not necessary to wait hours or days to be able use Bitcoin after installing, and these thin/light clients require only an insignificant amount of computer resources. A fix may be unnecessary (though it would be ideal) while servers can host the blockchain.

Aside from e-wallets (blockchain.info is usually fairly highly-regarded), there are clients such as Electrum for your desktop computer, and clients such as BitcoinJ and Bitcoin Spinner for Android. There are more if you look, but these are the services/clients I hear the most about. With the exception of e-wallets (in all cases I'm aware of), all these lite clients do not store your private keys on a central server, so you are at no risk of losing coins if one of these services are hacked.

Cheers!

This problem is so well-known that Satoshi described a fix in his original whitepaper
Now we just need it implemented...

Not a problem. The block chain could be compressed / collapsed at dedicated reference points in history.

Actually, clients could already do so right now, as this is just a 'local' issue and would not require any change in the protocol whatsoever.

Hi,

I've just started investigating Bitcoin, and am very excited about the overall concept. I've only read a small amount of the tech, but as I understand it, the Block Chain contains a history of all Bitcoin transactions, and this Block Chain is replicated and stored on every user's computer (is that correct??). And when I installed Bitcoin for the first time, it took many hours to download the Block Chain - which seems to corroborate with how I understand it...

The immediate question which comes to mind is: As Bitcoin grows and many people start using it then could this file not become so big that the whole system becomes totally unworkable? If a billion people are using Bitcoin as their primary trading currency, with multiple billion transactions happening every single day, and every node is constantly being updated with the new information from all of these transactions then it seems this could be a very real problem. Not just for Bitcoin but in terms of overall Internet bandwidth usage!

And pity the poor soul who has to download the Block Chain for the first time! It seems this will be an absolute limit on Bitcoin growth beyond the relatively small scale it is now... Or do I have it all wrong??

Another thing - if someone wanted to fuck with Bitcoin, especially once it becomes widely used, it seems all one would need to do is set up two accounts to automatically send one Bitcoin back and forth multiple times a second (perhaps hundreds or thousands of times a second) - if the software can be so set up, and if that transaction needs to update all one billion block chains at every node every time, then it seems to me it would all just grind to a dysfunctional halt.

I'm wanting to invest heavily in developing Bitcoin and perhaps even setting up an exchange in South Africa (average bandwidth about 1mbps), but if my concerns are real then it seems that Bitcoin might eventually become impractical to actually use once it gets to a certain size and level of adoption, and that in turn would cause the value of the currency to totally devalue. Seems potentially dangerous...

I would appreciate some solid and in depth responses to this.

Thanks for your help...