Quote
Storage
At very high transaction rates each block can be over half a gigabyte in size.
It is not required for most fully validating nodes to store the entire chain. In Satoshis paper he describes "pruning", a way to delete unnecessary data about transactions that are fully spent. This reduces the amount of data that is needed for a fully validating node to be only the size of the current unspent output size, plus some additional data that is needed to handle re-orgs. As of October 2012 (block 203258) there have been 7,979,231 transactions, however the size of the unspent output set is less than 100MiB, which is small enough to easily fit in RAM for even quite old computers.
Only a small number of archival nodes need to store the full chain going back to the genesis block. These nodes can be used to bootstrap new fully validating nodes from scratch but are otherwise unnecessary.
The primary limiting factor in Bitcoins performance is disk seeks once the unspent transaction output set stops fitting in memory. It is quite possible that the set will always fit in memory on dedicated server class machines, if hardware advances faster than Bitcoin usage does.
At very high transaction rates each block can be over half a gigabyte in size.
It is not required for most fully validating nodes to store the entire chain. In Satoshis paper he describes "pruning", a way to delete unnecessary data about transactions that are fully spent. This reduces the amount of data that is needed for a fully validating node to be only the size of the current unspent output size, plus some additional data that is needed to handle re-orgs. As of October 2012 (block 203258) there have been 7,979,231 transactions, however the size of the unspent output set is less than 100MiB, which is small enough to easily fit in RAM for even quite old computers.
Only a small number of archival nodes need to store the full chain going back to the genesis block. These nodes can be used to bootstrap new fully validating nodes from scratch but are otherwise unnecessary.
The primary limiting factor in Bitcoins performance is disk seeks once the unspent transaction output set stops fitting in memory. It is quite possible that the set will always fit in memory on dedicated server class machines, if hardware advances faster than Bitcoin usage does.
Ok, but is this being developed or is this just theory?
