haha...that said...That $622 node/small miner is cool.
1tb disk seems enough for now (maybe for 4-5 years longer), but a question to those who run a node: is pruning to reduce the size OK to do once you downloaded the whole chain?
Thinking of starting running a node, at least from time to time.
i vote full non pruning node for several reasons:
the most time consuming thing is the initial blockchain download.. that could take weeks/months depending on your connection. why throw away data you may want later (for re scanning wallets etc)
you can run your own block explorer against your full node
you can run other wallets against your full node
you can rescan multiple wallet.dats you have with your full node
storage is cheap
That is the one thing that wasn't taken care of in the Bitcoin conception. Size of the blockchain.
Sure, storage is cheap (at the time), but if the BC gets to sizes that are no more manageable conveniently at the private level, and the initial blockchain download becomes so effin big that it takes months on a standard connection (let's say, for now... 50mbps or so), less and less private full nodes will be added to the network, while the mining companies continue growing. In the end, a few big miners survive. I am thinking about slow, indirect movements towards decentralization.
I agree with you in the theoric part, but i dont know why you are thinking in that way, because as far as we see we are experiencing a revolution in speeds on connections and also in storage, 10 years ago we have only HDD for normal people and now we have such smalls and super fasters SDD, connections the same, ten or 15 years ago it was a miracle if 3G was connected at slow speed, now we have 5G and we can stream from whatever place we want.
So i think until the speed of the evolution in this things is faster than the weight of the blockchain is not even a real problem.
I agree, but look ahead under the fact that Moore's Law is broken. Even if storage/cent and speed grows in a linear way, the blockchain will grow faster. So the performace/(blockchain)byte ratio will likely go down. It's not hard to sync blocks, but as i said, the percentage of private miners will decrease.
On the mobile data issue: What i personally experienced was 3G getting slower with more people using it, now it's the same with 4G. 5G is not even available in my area yet, but i remember myself switching back to 3G mode to get faster and more reliable connections, ccompared to 4G, because of too many customers using the latter. Bad weather is still a factor for poor transfer rates, especially over longer ranges/low transceiver areal density.
In comparison, big mining farms likely have multiple fiberglass connections, one or two hops away from backbone routers, acres of servers... In the long run, big eats small, because mining is a business which is based on our economic rules.
I don't want to put Bitcoin down, but the aspect of growth (EDIT: and/or scaling) was not given enough attention, imho. A chronic problem in the IT industry i was in, balls deep.
