Topic: Does Bitcoin become more decentralized over time? - page 2. (Read 710 times)

I have multiple discs and I am not even near the full capacity and having one dedicated drive or partition just for Bitcoin blockchain is not that hard for anyone today.
Let me give you few examples, I think anyone can afford to purchase 4TB (or less) Toshiba or Seagate HDD for under $100 or even cheaper with some deal.
If we want to choose faster Samsung SSD with 2TB we can find them for $250 or cheaper.

Now we can't exactly predict size of Bitcoin blockchain but looking at this Statista chart, I think we are not going to reach even 400GB or 500GB in next few years, and data from Ycharts is showing 142.6% Average Growth Rate.

No reasonable person would suggest such thing, blockchain data not being important  

A blockchain is a data structure that preserves data, a database. Any database goes through events/transactions continuously and as a consequence its state is subject to change through time. What matters from the perspective of most applications is the state and not the events/transactions.  They are valuable as far as they are relevant as a part of the state. In Bitcoin case, a transaction is not relevant anymore when all of its outputs are spent.

The naive "rewind" approach to bootstrapping fresh nodes which is employed in the current Bitcoin implementation is not the only technology available, there are more robust, trust-less, and secure approaches as well.

You can mine altcoins and exchange them for Bitcoin as soon as possible, it is the simplest way that works for now. Mining single satoshis with a CPU and receiving them by LN would be awesome and would make things less centralized, but such ideas need more research to bring it into reality.

If you ask someone who mined bitcoin with his GPU/CPU in the beginning, the network has become quite centralized in the sense that you can no longer do that. It would be like a human competing against a calculator who will finish his multiplication faster. Bitcoin is decentralized for those who have the financial means to invest in expensive hardware and compete against huge mining firms, and this will become more and more difficult in the future. Ask a solo miner if it is.

Do they help if the RPi is in a constant bottleneck though? There was a time when portable RPi Zero full nodes were being sold around, and these certainly don't meet the requirements for running a full node and incoming connections might only make things worse. The lowest possible version of it that could handle full nodes decently are probably from RPi 3 and up; otherwise, it's all just a struggle for both the RPi owner and those connecting to it

I have a low-to-mid range gaming laptop from ~2012 and I wanted to use it as a full node for my BTC activity. I thought old PCs were not going to be an issue in holding full nodes on them, but I recently gave up the idea.

Having to wait 2-3 weeks for the blockchain to fully sync is annoying, so is having to catch up with the latest blocks. I usually have to leave my laptop running overnight to catch up with all blocks if the laptop has been turned off for a few days.

The fact that you cannot simply take an older PC to use it with your Bitcoin activity (or a RPi) sucks tbh. Unless nodes become more portable and require less computing power and storage space, full nodes will slowly become less and less affordable for the average person.

When you get your first BTC, if you're in it for the tech, you're likely going to look for the safest way to store it.. but if the safest one is too expensive or takes awfully long, you're going to rather use an SPV wallet or a custodial one. The problem is that I'm not very sure that HDDs and SSDs will become cheaper fast enough. If the block size gets to 500-750GB before 1TB storage components become as cheap as 500GB ones are today, then running full nodes will become less and less affordable so it'll still be the richer who'll afford it..

Pruned nodes are obviously not as beneficial as archival nodes but they are still beneficial to the network and contribute to decentralization of the network.

In my opinion people running a full node on RPis aren't really helping anyone. They are more of a hobby thing to use rather than a serious full node set out to make a contribution to the backbone of bitcoin.

And that is why I think we have fundamentally different ideas of how Bitcoin should function, based on your past response about how verification of block data is not necessary, etc. If your view is that blockchain data is not important, then I believe that you'll probably disagree with everything that I say.
I believe that there is nothing wrong with making it more available. Having more "archival" full nodes would be far more useful for initial synchronization both in terms of it's speed and availability. I'm aware that pruned nodes can almost function like an "archival" full node but I fail to see how it would be as beneficial than the other, given that the bulk of the benefits falls on the user using the full node. If the blockchain size grows even further, people that are hosting them on RPis and servers may not want to run it anymore.

We can only argue that more Archival Full Nodes are going to benefit the network only if there is a shortage of them that makes syncing hard for new nodes that come online or puts extra pressure on the existing Archival Full Nodes.
I don't think this is the case since we have enough of them to supply the historical blockchain.

The Pruned Full Nodes are benefiting the network and contributing to decentralization by doing what any full node would do: enforce consensus rules.

You have to do nothing , but observe the past ~11 year history of bitcoin.
Blocksize is irrelevant in the discussion.

Centralization is and already has occurred , limited mining pools only 3 or 4 have over 51% and have had over 51% for years.

The second ASICS were invented and the little guy was pushed aside in mining, decentralization died.

Yes....but, you do waiting weeks to do the initial download will turn off a lot of people.
Also, add reliable internet.  If your connection keeps dropping and you have to keep waiting to get caught up to send your funds or to look for payments also sucks.


If the only thing on your machine is Bitcoin and your OS, yes. I was thinking about some poorer locations where you only have one PC so it's for bitcoin, surfing the web, doing school work, downloading videos, running quickbooks, etc. That can eat up drive space quickly.

-Dave

Bitcoin started as a pilot project, continued as a fun and became permanent because it is what blockchains do, they become permanent!

It is very inappropriate to brag with bitcoin, instead of contributing to it for fixing the problems and shortcomings, kinda sectarian.

it is not experimental. it is the well tested strong implementation of a peer to peer digital cash that works safely and is decentralized.
there are of course other protocols but none have been able to reach the same level of security and decentralization. they have bigger flaws.

Decentralization is not an ideological belief nor a partisan talking point, it is about math and engineering. Your one-person-one-copy idea is not supported by science, it is just a slogan, a misleading one, to be specific.

How is that? Pruned nodes "benefit the network" just like any other full node, with just one exception: they are not helpful with the stupid bootstrap process in the current (experimental) implementation of the protocol, nothing else, not a tiny bit of any sign of being inferior compared to a historian full node ... I just made it up  

Pruning works just fine. I think we have fundamentally different concepts of what true decentralization is; which is for everyone to have a copy of their blockchain for me as we're touching on the topic of decentralization. You may correct in your own right and I can't really dispute that either. I'd prefer having more nodes with the entire blockchain rather than nodes which only stores the last few GBs of the blockchain which really wouldn't benefit the network more than the others.

I don't get it. 
Why People are so concerned about HDD capacity? We have pruning already, a pruned full node works just fine.

They would still have lower requirements than Bitcoin Core; less bandwidth, less time taken, more privacy, etc. Definitely would outweigh any disadvantages.
At current capacity, Bitcoin can't stay at that rate of growth if we want to accommodate more transactions. I'm not too sure about the rate of growth for HDDs, price might have gotten cheaper but the growth of Bitcoin could be faster than the growth of HDD capacity. I have doubts that most people can have enough space for a full node ontop of their own files and would probably just to forego that completely. Coupled with a fairly long initial synchronization as well as a catchup after not opening it for a while.

Few years ago I purchased 4TB HDD disc and that is now even cheaper, and SSD disc are now also affordable and much faster.
When I purchased my first SSD it was expensive and had limited storage, but now you can find 1TB or 2TB SSD M.2 like Samsung or Adata in reasonable prices with good five year warranty.
I think current size of Bitcoin blockchain is around 330 GB, and with current yearly growth of around 25% I think that having few TB disc will last for years without any issue.

By regulating the block size? Yes it can. And I believe, ask the Core developers to be sure, that’s the plan. Let the current hardware available overshoot the current maximum requirement to run a full node. BUT, there’s also a problem, the developers/community can’t demand everyone in a decentralized network to upgrade their hardware, it has to come naturally. Then better option, for this and other reasons, regulate the block size.

Actually the number of bitcoin full nodes is more volatile than the price itself! It goes up and down with wild swings. Part of it is because of the price, as I explained above the incentive to run a full node is the more valuable bitcoin the users hold also the increasing number of users. For example back in 2013 we had lots of  full nodes which started going down after the bubble popped then started increasing in 2015. We also had the ATH (~200k) in Jan 2018 at roughly the same time with bitcoin price ATH. It started going back up in 2019 again.
This shows the history from 2017 only: https://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/historical.html