Just think why BTC hasn't been introduced 20 years earlier!
I have faith in internet and its evolution
Topic: Size of BTC blockchain centuries from now... - page 3. (Read 10798 times)
all the problems and issues are solved as they arrived
Just think why BTC hasn't been introduced 20 years earlier!
I have faith in internet and its evolution
Just think why BTC hasn't been introduced 20 years earlier!
I have faith in internet and its evolution
I'm confused! "Networks" cannot store data, they're networks. So someone somewhere on some storage media has the actual block data, right? I assumed it was everyone and that the most logical storage method would be a database and not a flat file. I get the indexing part, whether it's were to be in a database with the blocks as a separate table or not, since it allows you to find a block super quickly. But, if everyone deleted blk*.dat then who on the network are they going to download the new version from? Nobody would have it, lol. Unless it's generated by reindexing their local copy of the block chain that you're saying they don't have. 3GB is kinda big for an index file though, so aren't all the blk.dat files the chain data itself?
My projections from looking at the following graph tells me we will have 10²⁴ GB hard drives in the year 2120.
Ie. if I just project the line out to the year 2120, it tells me that - at that point in time - hard drives will have a capacity of 1,000 billion billion terabytes.
So to put that in perspective, a 100 byte file on a 10 TB hard drive today will, in the year 2120, have the same relative size as a 10 TB file on a 1,000 billion billion TB hard drive.
So the 100 bytes that what we now think of as a tiny amount of data (about three times the size of an ECC key) will be equivalent to 10 TB in the year 2120.
If the projections hold. Personally, I don't think they will hold. I think widely available storage media will exceed these sizes going over 100 years into the future.
Ie. if I just project the line out to the year 2120, it tells me that - at that point in time - hard drives will have a capacity of 1,000 billion billion terabytes.
So to put that in perspective, a 100 byte file on a 10 TB hard drive today will, in the year 2120, have the same relative size as a 10 TB file on a 1,000 billion billion TB hard drive.
So the 100 bytes that what we now think of as a tiny amount of data (about three times the size of an ECC key) will be equivalent to 10 TB in the year 2120.
If the projections hold. Personally, I don't think they will hold. I think widely available storage media will exceed these sizes going over 100 years into the future.
In the next release, they will most likely make the switch to levelDB, which will be significantly faster in disk I/O.
How would that possibly work? Everyone would download a new version of the blockchain database...from each other? When nobody has it? Lol, so the original releaser of the fully converted database would be able to put whatever the hell they wanted in it
So it'd have to be a very lengthy and difficult conversion process or a flat switch over supporting two databases, which is also not ideal.The block format used on the network has not changed. It is underlying database index on-disk that is changing.
It is trivial to rebuild the database index: just delete blk*.dat, and download fresh from the network.
The blockchain data itself has not changed, and continues to be self-verifying (integrity protected by hash).
In the next release, they will most likely make the switch to levelDB, which will be significantly faster in disk I/O.
How would that possibly work? Everyone would download a new version of the blockchain database...from each other? When nobody has it? Lol, so the original releaser of the fully converted database would be able to put whatever the hell they wanted in it
So it'd have to be a very lengthy and difficult conversion process or a flat switch over supporting two databases, which is also not ideal.Erm. I'm not sure where to start.
The blocks aren't in the database, they are just stuffed into files, and those files will not be changing at all. What goes in the database is just index information so that blocks can be found quickly when needed.
The network passes blocks around, not files. There is no need to distribute "new" database files. New clients that don't have the blocks loaded will continue to load them as usual, by asking the network for them. I haven't been following the work on leveldb, but I see no reason why the client couldn't include both sets of database libraries so that people upgrading can keep reading their old indexes while they generate the new ones.
And, I promise to leave at least one of my personal nodes running an old version for quite a while, just in case.
In the next release, they will most likely make the switch to levelDB, which will be significantly faster in disk I/O.
How would that possibly work? Everyone would download a new version of the blockchain database...from each other? When nobody has it? Lol, so the original releaser of the fully converted database would be able to put whatever the hell they wanted in it
So it'd have to be a very lengthy and difficult conversion process or a flat switch over supporting two databases, which is also not ideal. If you have the RAM and hardware, maybe put your datadir inside a ramdrive. At least until it was updated.
This is the only remedy I see as of now. And I'm afraid that transaction history will possibly grow in size faster than average RAM. So, even this method may not be an option in the near future. 
If you have the RAM and hardware, maybe put your datadir inside a ramdrive. At least until it was updated.
In the next release, they will most likely make the switch to levelDB, which will be significantly faster in disk I/O.
This is very good news indeed!
This is an important conversation to be having!
I've been concerned about the large blockchain since I first started studying and using bitcoin in 2011. I recently installed the Satoshi client on a new PC and it took many hours to download/calculate the blockchain. With so many users now having fast broadband Internet access, the size of the chain isn't the killer. It is the huge I/O tasks involved. I have been trying the Satoshi client out in a Virtual Box Windows 7 image and it is nearly unusable for 2-3 hours if I haven't run it for a few days and the client has to catch back up. The hard drive just is maxed out making the physical machine nearly unusable. I've been looking at alternative clients that don't require the full block chain and am glad to see work progressing in that area.
It is pretty amazing how long it takes these days... I had a client that was updated through block 135,000 or so, then turned off for months. Started it back up the other day, and it took 3 days on a 1TB WD Black drive to finally get up to date - HDD crunching away the whole time. I've been concerned about the large blockchain since I first started studying and using bitcoin in 2011. I recently installed the Satoshi client on a new PC and it took many hours to download/calculate the blockchain. With so many users now having fast broadband Internet access, the size of the chain isn't the killer. It is the huge I/O tasks involved. I have been trying the Satoshi client out in a Virtual Box Windows 7 image and it is nearly unusable for 2-3 hours if I haven't run it for a few days and the client has to catch back up. The hard drive just is maxed out making the physical machine nearly unusable. I've been looking at alternative clients that don't require the full block chain and am glad to see work progressing in that area.
This is an important conversation to be having!
I've been concerned about the large blockchain since I first started studying and using bitcoin in 2011. I recently installed the Satoshi client on a new PC and it took many hours to download/calculate the blockchain. With so many users now having fast broadband Internet access, the size of the chain isn't the killer. It is the huge I/O tasks involved. I have been trying the Satoshi client out in a Virtual Box Windows 7 image and it is nearly unusable for 2-3 hours if I haven't run it for a few days and the client has to catch back up. The hard drive just is maxed out making the physical machine nearly unusable. I've been looking at alternative clients that don't require the full block chain and am glad to see work progressing in that area.
I've been concerned about the large blockchain since I first started studying and using bitcoin in 2011. I recently installed the Satoshi client on a new PC and it took many hours to download/calculate the blockchain. With so many users now having fast broadband Internet access, the size of the chain isn't the killer. It is the huge I/O tasks involved. I have been trying the Satoshi client out in a Virtual Box Windows 7 image and it is nearly unusable for 2-3 hours if I haven't run it for a few days and the client has to catch back up. The hard drive just is maxed out making the physical machine nearly unusable. I've been looking at alternative clients that don't require the full block chain and am glad to see work progressing in that area.
In the next release, they will most likely make the switch to levelDB, which will be significantly faster in disk I/O.
This is an important conversation to be having!
I've been concerned about the large blockchain since I first started studying and using bitcoin in 2011. I recently installed the Satoshi client on a new PC and it took many hours to download/calculate the blockchain. With so many users now having fast broadband Internet access, the size of the chain isn't the killer. It is the huge I/O tasks involved. I have been trying the Satoshi client out in a Virtual Box Windows 7 image and it is nearly unusable for 2-3 hours if I haven't run it for a few days and the client has to catch back up. The hard drive just is maxed out making the physical machine nearly unusable. I've been looking at alternative clients that don't require the full block chain and am glad to see work progressing in that area.
I've been concerned about the large blockchain since I first started studying and using bitcoin in 2011. I recently installed the Satoshi client on a new PC and it took many hours to download/calculate the blockchain. With so many users now having fast broadband Internet access, the size of the chain isn't the killer. It is the huge I/O tasks involved. I have been trying the Satoshi client out in a Virtual Box Windows 7 image and it is nearly unusable for 2-3 hours if I haven't run it for a few days and the client has to catch back up. The hard drive just is maxed out making the physical machine nearly unusable. I've been looking at alternative clients that don't require the full block chain and am glad to see work progressing in that area.
No one would want anything permanently stuck on our body (except tattoos). There are movies about this, even old ones.
There would be no more anonymity (which can even be more valuable than many other things) or privacy if our public keys (or private keys) are embedded in our body.
A token might work, but people would be sure to shield them (like RFID passports and credit cards / smart cards.)
There would be no more anonymity (which can even be more valuable than many other things) or privacy if our public keys (or private keys) are embedded in our body.
A token might work, but people would be sure to shield them (like RFID passports and credit cards / smart cards.)
I have a feeling within 20 years, money will be dna encoded or something and our 'wallets' are kept right on / as part of our body, all this silly paper / metal disks, and virtual dollars and bitcoins will be long gone.
Aaron
Aaron
Ooh the far future, cool.
(/Charles Stross mode on)
Humanity in 2500AD only very superficially resembles that of today. After a few recompilations and refactorings of the underlying mind substrate, and after converting most of the matter in the solar system to computronium, the concept of a human as we know it today seems pretty quaint.
This general purpose programmable material makes it possible to store information at a density never even imagined, by rearranging matter at a scale of particles not yet known today. And there are rumors of other civilizations, far away in the Magellanic cloud, storing information directly in the quantum state by performing a timing attack on the underlying fabric of spacetime.
One of the weakly godlike intelligences decides to use their spare cycles in the Jupiter Brain to compute the Kolmogorov complexity of the block chain, which at that point in time consists of 10^20 bytes of audit trail of artificially intelligent financial instruments solving the problem of interstellar trade between relativistic frames of reference...
(/Charles Stross mode off)
(/Charles Stross mode on)
Humanity in 2500AD only very superficially resembles that of today. After a few recompilations and refactorings of the underlying mind substrate, and after converting most of the matter in the solar system to computronium, the concept of a human as we know it today seems pretty quaint.
This general purpose programmable material makes it possible to store information at a density never even imagined, by rearranging matter at a scale of particles not yet known today. And there are rumors of other civilizations, far away in the Magellanic cloud, storing information directly in the quantum state by performing a timing attack on the underlying fabric of spacetime.
One of the weakly godlike intelligences decides to use their spare cycles in the Jupiter Brain to compute the Kolmogorov complexity of the block chain, which at that point in time consists of 10^20 bytes of audit trail of artificially intelligent financial instruments solving the problem of interstellar trade between relativistic frames of reference...
(/Charles Stross mode off)
In 1980 a 26 MB hard drive cost ~$5,000 (or $193,000,000 per TB).
Obviously angry birds isn't viable. I mean who is going to spend a couple hundred dollars in storage on a free game.
Obviously angry birds isn't viable. I mean who is going to spend a couple hundred dollars in storage on a free game.
I paid $800 for a ten megabyte hard drive in 1987.
wtf do you mean centuries from now?
it's only good until 2120 something
I better correct that before people fill up their flamethrowers. It's only going to keep being created for <100 years it's only good until 2120 something
it'll still be "good" and useful lol.Btw my system's not running Linux but don't hate, at least I recoginzed that as Linux from my Redhat training lol. That does answer my Q since I assume that means it's around 1028MB but just so I know for future reference, aww fuck it, I ran a search
it's in C:\Users\[your username]\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin\...except mine's 2,048,142KB for blk0001.dat and 1,100,784KB for blk0002.dat and 1,030,936KB for blkindex.dat.
Btw what precisely are each of those?
There isn't precise answer. The blocks are just appended to the block file(s), as they come in. Each node has a (potentially) unique view of orphan blocks.
by that time I see an entirely new form of currency and bit coins will be about as obsolete as 8 track tapes.
Check your (physical) wallet. The 8-track tapes are in there. The entirely new form of currency is here.
...except mine's 2,048,142KB for blk0001.dat and 1,100,784KB for blk0002.dat and 1,030,936KB for blkindex.dat.
Btw what precisely are each of those?
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Data_directory#FilesBtw what precisely are each of those?
Blockchain data is split in 2GB files.
wtf do you mean centuries from now?
it's only good until 2120 something
I better correct that before people fill up their flamethrowers. It's only going to keep being created for <100 years it's only good until 2120 something
it'll still be "good" and useful lol.Btw my system's not running Linux but don't hate, at least I recoginzed that as Linux from my Redhat training lol. That does answer my Q since I assume that means it's around 1028MB but just so I know for future reference, aww fuck it, I ran a search
it's in C:\Users\[your username]\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin\...except mine's 2,048,142KB for blk0001.dat and 1,100,784KB for blk0002.dat and 1,030,936KB for blkindex.dat.
Btw what precisely are each of those?
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