Topic: Is anybody working on pruning on the main client? (Read 2054 times)

Bitcoin was never intended to run on every user's machine.  Absolute decentralization isn't a requirement, and it's long been expected that Bitcoin will scale as much as it needs to scale, and will naturally centralize as much as it needs to do accomplish that scaling.  That said, SPV mode & pruning are both among the early plans to reduce the need for this as much as is reasonable.  There is no doubt that the whole blockchain will persist somewhere, and that this is more likely to be done by an institution for many reasons. 

i've worked with average people (as in not technically skilled about computers) for decades at local university so i got to know how they think and the limits of their understanding (as in interest in learning something they don't have to/want't to or need to).
anyway, a game which they will delete after a few weeks and replace with another. not so for the blockchain
you really don't see the problem with such a huge amount of space required? how long do you think it will take to sync a 100gig blockchain. weeks? what about 1tera, a month?
so first time user will have to wait way LONGER than a bank wire transfer. so much for the "transaction speed".

so on one hand you have the idea of decentralization, and on the other ease of the use and efficiency. what is the middleground? some form of distributed blockchain?

You obviously missed the fact that lifting the max block size is also on the agenda...

Plus imagine how much time it will take to download the blockchain, starting from block #1 in the 2030s.
That's of course assuming that we will keep relying on the bitcoin elite to solve our problems.
Which we obviously won't, because we are not crazy to delegate such an important tasks to such a lame and corrupt developement team

That is why I do not defend purging and never have.

I do think though that it is very important to solve the scalability issues, likely through some method of the chain's compression...
Yet before the blockchain grows up to 1TB of data.
55-60 GB of transaction data per year is not a problem for you - well, that's great man, but for me it seems a bit extreme, to say the least.

SPV clients are not a solution, since they don't contribute to the network - they only look at it.

...I'm outta here.

If you don't understand why fully pruned nodes with cryptographic proof in the chain headers are much worse than SPV (since they won't need to rely on full history nodes) are MUCH worse for the network centralization wise, you can go on and spread your rants and complaints to yourself.

Edit:
P.S.:
Approximate point in time this will happen, unless there is a hard fork:
In the 2030s. You will need to replace your HDDs (which live about 5 years) 3-4 times until then.

What is on the agenda here, forcing most of the nodes to switch into SPV mode - this is an indirect attack on the decentralization, which is an extremely important property of this currency and a major factor in its market value.

You can pretend having a good intentions, but your objective is clearly hostile.

"Normal" users will NOT be happy with a fully pruned chain state, as this only contains their current balances and 0 history.

I would love to see fater developments too, but as you can see, even if you pay someone a few 10k USD (as happened in the thread I linked) they will still rather ask for more than producing workable code. If you want to see development work done on pruning, please read the thread I linked and "donate" to his funding goal, develop yourself or hire someone else/better to do this.

Complaining about slow development speed will only slow this spped down further, as I am sure a few devs will waste their time reading this thread in the hopes that someone stepped up for the challenge or to answer the question initially asked and instead will be presented with your rants.

Yeah, give us more reasons why implementing a chain compression isn't important at all - and thus will take you so much time as I said it would...
Plus, we need more patronizing from the bitcoin elite, because they are the ones who know how to write a bitcoin software, while we obviously know nothing about it.

SPV clients is the future of bitcoin and the key to the solution of its ever known scalability issues.
After every node (except the ones run by Google) switches to SPV mode everything will be just perfect and all the problems will be gone once and for all

Sorry, but if you want to run Bitcoin-QT on a local machine, it will be easily able to handle the few GB (current computer games are MUCH larger) of space and traffic. Otherwise you can also use prominently featured lighter clients like Electrum or Multibit.

Please tell me exactly why me reasoning that having a block chain that contains 4 years(!) of binary transaction data and still is half the size of a current computer game (random google, yes I know it's XBox One...: http://callofduty.digitalwarfare247.com/2013/11/call-of-duty-ghosts-is-a-39gb-install-on-xbox-one/) is "arrogant and narrow minded"?!

Currently the block size limit is ~1 MB, which gives a constant hard cap of about 55-60 GB of transaction data per year. This can be stored on a USB drive that you can get for 30 USD with free shipping (again random google, I am sure you can get it cheaper too: http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Cruzer-Flash-Drive-SDCZ36-064G-AFFP/dp/B007JR5304).

How the hell is this amount of storage going to drive away "most of the average people"?

yea sorry about that, but arrogant and narrowminded people just annoy me sometimes.
(judging by the quote: "If you have such an old PC that a few GB are of concern").
i know about spv mode clients, but until every major client is such and featured prominently in download sections, this has the potential of driving away most of the average people.

No, this is why SPV mode supporting clients exist. Perhaps you should refrain from posting in the technical subforum until you're a little more aware of how the Bitcoin system works. Also, please try to treat the other contributors with a bit more respect.  Responses like " lol" from clueless people drives away competent contributors.

hi there piotr!

i can't... stop... laughing. LOL

and this line of reasoning is why everything gets so unnecessarily bloated.
multiply 10 gigs by millions of users (and billions of devices) and the result is a HORRIBLE WASTE of resources
(client hardware, internet bandwidth, electricity for all hardware involved, etc)
this is a big problem which might actually prevent global bitcoin adoption
average user wants to run a simple client and start using it right away.
what he gets right now is hours/days of waiting for "sync" to finish.
unacceptable if you're looking for widespread adoption by non-tech population
not to mention its already 10 #@$ gigs and its been only few years,
with the volume of transactions only a fraction of what will be coming in the future.
do you expect every single client to store 100 terabytes and wait for months to sync??? lol

A contract with no timeline?

The Litecoin Dev team did contract with Peter Todd to do all the work necessary to implement pruning and to have it submitted to Bitcoin github for code review.  This includes pruning and various supporting code that has been proposed by others.  For example, "archive nodes" would store a full copy of the blockchain.  "Fully verifying nodes" no longer need the entire blockchain, but for the network to be healthy and capable of syncing new clients they need to keep subsets of the blockchain. There also needs to be a way to tell peers what ranges of blocks you have available.

While it would be bad to allow peers to have less than a full blockchain, this is a balancing act.  With the rapid growth of the blockchain the quantity of listening nodes on the network has been continually shrinking.  Perhaps fully verifying nodes that store subsets of the blockchain would allow more listening nodes to exist comfortably on the global network.

Well, I would be surprised if you were not ahead of me, since I have not even worked on this.
And I cannot work on this, since it is literally impossible to change a peer-to-peer protocol while being  the only peer on the network.
There were times when I had my ideas and energy to work on such things, but you guys seem to always know better and it doesn't seem like you need anyone new in the team.
And now, after the latest red list revelations, it's even a team that I would be ashamed to join, so no thanks and good luck.

Anyway, all I am saying is that it goes very slowly and as much as I believe that some members of your team are sincere, competent and professional - there are also others who are intentionally disturbing to drive this project in the right direction, often using a dirty methods. But then you defend them when I point it out.
You obviously act as a team and you cannot blame people for judging you as a team.
Plus, you cannot expect others to not beat your team in the competition, considering that to beat you on a software development field does not seem like an extreme challenge, even for a single developer, not to mention an actual team.

So my advise to the bitcoin elite: you guys either take your shit together and start doing your job right, or you will be out of this business soon - meaning that even the admiration from people who have no idea how lame this project's development has recently been will be gone within a single day.

Nah, we're just subtle about it, the kind of subtlety that involves orchestrating an angry mob to stop the rapist rather than doing so ourselves. More concretely, remind yourself again about who's been behind the latest interest in CoinJoin; I personally just spent a week at the DarkWallet hackathon.



Look up "MMR TXO commitments" among other things - we're way ahead of you mate.

FWIW I've been hired by Mastercoin to work full-time on crypto-coin research - scalability will definitely be one of the focuses of my work.

You know, it's not that I care very much to increase my ignore digit... it just happens out of my control.
But let's be realistic and someone finally has to say it.

Almost five thousands years ago, it took Egyptians about twenty years to build the Great Pyramid of Giza.
If the current bitcoin elite, put into power by the satoshi himself, will manage to solve the ever known bitcoin scalability issues in less then that, then you guys will have a reason to be really proud of yourself... Though honestly, looking at your progress from the past couple of years, I have serious doubts about you meeting the deadline

Anyway, putting strife away and focusing on the job that eventually has to be done and will be done by someone, some day.

There is only one ultimate purging solution which does not affect the network's decentralization and address the scalability issues.
Start distributing snapshots of UTXO database, with the snapshots' security protected by the blockchain and the miners.
But that's definitely too far fetched idea, as for this team - 25 years at least, 10 of which just to realize that all the other options suck...
I'll be using viagra, instead of the memory impairing drug, by then

Just because you're looking at a guy raping a girl, while doing nothing to stop it - it does not make you innocent in the crime.
Unless he was keeping a gun aimed at you, while you were watching it, was he?