Topic: Centralisation of the Bitcoin network through growth (Read 204 times)

That's why Bitcoin supporters disagree with raising block size as main scaling solution and instead use 2nd layer (such as LN), optimize the protocol/transaction/scripting and optimize the client used for full nodes.


If we want see Bitcoin become popular/widely usage, obviously we need to increase the block weight even considering almost everyone use 2nd layer protocol and that could risk decentralization.

Even your assumptions come true, there are other projects that develop different protocols like GeeqChain and Proof of Honesty for example.

Better scalability and security would be established in the future that will still maintain the decentralization at the peak.

Here is what Satoshi had to say on this matter.


https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.6306

With mainstream adoption which is I assume what we are all hoping for and the replacement of fiat currencies there would be a massive amount of growth and probably millions/billions of transactions per day. This is the growth that I'm referring too.


I think bandwidth will be the limiting factor in most underdeveloped countries. Consider some parts of Africa as an example currently they are able to host full nodes however with the increase of size of the blockchain they might not be able to keep up because of the limitations that Africa put on their customers. I lived in S Africa for a while which is considered a little more developed than other parts but internet is still a serious problem there.

1 block is added to the chain approximately every 10 minutes. That means at most 6MB per hour, 144 MB per day or ~52.5 GB per year. Where do you see an exponential growth here? Even if we consider Segwit, or even if the block size is further increased in the future, that's still a linear growth. I'm not sure how you came up with petabytes, with current growth we'll reach 1 terabyte in about 20 years, that means 20K years you reach 1 petabyte.

Now, even if your calculations were somehow correct, I'm not sure why that would result in centralization. Bandwidth is a much tighter limit than storage. Reaching those numbers in the near future would require a huge bandwidth. If such bandwidth would be maintainable by enough people then surely storage would be cheap enough and most people would still be able to run full nodes.

I'm specifically wanting to discuss the possibilities of developed countries only having access to the hardware and bandwidth capabilities that the Blockchain may require in the future. As the Blockchain gets bigger through more transactions and more blocks stored within it running a node may become limited to developed countries alone.

I'm not sure what the estimated size of the Blockchain when all the Bitcoin has been mined but judging by the size of it now and if it did become mainstream then we would be seeing exponential growth which will lead to more centralization because not everyone will have to equipment or internet capabilities to run a full node.

This may mean that full nodes which we rely on for the security of the network will be controlled only by wealthy individuals or those from developed countries. At the moment almost everyone in the world has the requirements to run a Bitcoin  node. Hard drives are cheap and bandwidth is only the limiting factor around the world. Even then people just download it over the course of a month or something.

However if the Blockchain is exposure to the mainstream how are we going to make sure that the network remains decentralized? Especially when Bitcoin rises to petabytes instead of gigabytes. Are we solely relying on the fact that technology should advance at the same rate as the Blockchain growing?