Topic: Is the Bitcoin Block Chain too big? - page 3. (Read 7192 times)

Just for the fun I started again bitcoinqt on a laptop i haven't used in a while.
It says 31525 blocks remaining , I wonder how long it will take.

Well the growth of the blockchain seems to be following an exponential trend, and if it continues like that it wont be surprising to see it larger than 1 TB by 2017.

This is exactly why I've put so much of my effort into developing a new type of mini-blockchain scheme which doesn't require every transaction ever made to be saved forever.

Unless the attacker isolates you from the rest of the network.

If one is paranoid they could check tx against multiple electrum server or even run their own in the cloud to ensure they are getting good data.

Sometimes ownership of private keys is not enough. If Electrum can fake received transactions in ur "wallet" they can cheat u. With Bitcoin-Qt u can be sure that if u see "6 confirmations" then there are indeed 6 confirmations.

it sounds like he doesn't know what electrum is, or how it works.

What are you talking about?

In what way do you not own your own bitcoins with Electrum (or MultiBit)?

With both those wallets, you have exclusive control of your private keys.

If Electrum or MultiBit are "third party services", then so is Bitcoin-Qt.

13GB is not much to download. 100GB would be size I would reconsider using Electrum client instead.

It doesn't matter if it's really big. You just have to buy another hard drive for your dedicated wallet.

Saying electrum (or SPV client) is a third party service is misleading.
Please explain how electrum server would steal your coins.  The truth is you probably have no clue, you probable attack vector.

translation
dont own your own bitcoins use a third party service that can take the coins..

i personally would say for those people that get bitcoins as a wage and spend them on foodler.com and bitcoinstore, meaning the "consumer" class of people, then yes using third party services for weekly amounts is acceptable.

but for investors and long term savers i would say using the proper client with full blockchain and understanding the best practices of backing up and paper wallet funds long term is advantageous.

You don't have to use Bitcoin-qt you can use Electrum as local wallet

i do like these video's but the summation of predicted size of the blockchain in 2016 is a little over the top.
i remember that as of spring 2012 i had to download 8GB of blockchain data. 18 months later it is 11GB so that is only 3GB increase this year...

I am not sure how you even came to the 1.3 Terrabytes total. to get to that figure each block would need to be a fully packed to the top, filled with transactions 25mb block size limit
25x6 =150MB each hour
144x 24 hours=3.6GB each day
3600x365 days=1.3TB each year

i think you are presuming the block limit for 2014-2015 will be lifted to 5mb and 2015-2016 will be lifted to 20mb and that is totally on the presumption that EVERY block has 100% utilisation of transactions filling up 100% of each block to require such a huge jump.

so here goes, a more accurate (yet still guessed) increase of the blockchain size per year

so far 2013: the maximum size of a block is 1MB, there are 6 blocks per hour (1 per 10 minute average) 24 hours in a day 365.. = 52,560GB MAXIMUM chain increase size per year if 100% utilised.
meaning in 2 years (2016) it will be under an 8th of a terrabyte(125GB) if each block was totally 100% filled to the 1mb per block size.

so far the 2009-2012 have shown small amount of transactions which dont utilise the full 1MB space per block, even in 2013 on average only a 5th-8th (12%-20%)of a 1MB block gets utilised meaning the total blockchain for 4 years of running is only 11gb, not hundreds of gigabytes.

so lets pretend transactions atleast doubled next year on average(lets say moved from the 12-20% upto 33% block fill) there maybe another 17GB added to the blockchain totalling 29GB for 2014-2015. and each block still has space per block.

again another year passes and transactions increase double fold equalling 35GB for the 2015-2016 or 64GB for the 2009-2015 total, again still room in the block for more transactions.

i do not think that it will be terrabytes of data, because somehow, somewhere you got the 5fold increase figure, and then used this against the presumption of 100% filled blocks.

now the knit pick is over. you do have potential as a presenter, but its still worth you double checking your figures and research before posting videos or your credibility will slowly decline

Not at all, nowdays most people buy thin clients like iPad (16GB-32GB) or small laptops (120GB-240GB) instead of heavy desktop PCs with 2TB HDD.
Heavy desktops will become a minority among households, so if we care about decentralization we must consider what kind of clients most people will be using within a few years.
When people need terrabyte storage they buy USB-drives or NAS-drives - which are useless to host the bitcoin client.

That's a very bold claim, that most people use laptops with SSD. I for one do not know any of them.
I agree that the thing to do is to make a lightweight version of the blockchain that would contain only current spendable transaction outputs. But anyone willing to host the full blockchain should have the means to do so.

Most people use laptops with SSD, and cant afford to have a blockchain size of 40 GB or bigger.. that consumes 1/3 or 1/6 of their SSD size.
If we want a truly decentralized network, nobody should be excluded. The solution is therefore to make the blockchain dynamic and small instead of one gigantic mirror on every HDD in the network.

C'mon. I got the orange button for fighting against the Bitcoin Foundation. And by the way, how can somebody prove that something does not exist? Care to prove the solution of the scalability problem DOES exist? Or will u just ignore this request like all other core devs did?

Or you can ignore people with glowing orange buttons who make unsupported claims.

Comparison of blockchain size to HDD capacity is irrelevant. Ppl who do that usualy don't understand what the issue is.
Anyway, blockchain size problem is unresolvable with currently used technologies/approaches. Core developers won't admit it, u waste time talking about the problem, better switch to other currency.

As long as it fits on 2TB hard drive, it is not too big. I think there are many of us, who value the bitcoin more than a hundred bucks (which is the price of such HDD nowadays). Blockchain bigger than that would be a bit cumbersome on current office PCs, I admit. But it would take 200 years at present pace to reach this limit.

Jason, first thanks for the all the videos you've made they were really helpful for me when I was studying btc at the beginning. To answer the question, I think it's fine as it is but I also think that future wallets will have default settings which won't download the full chain.