Topic: what are they going to do when the bitcoin chain becomes prohibitively large? - page 2. (Read 2391 times)

There is ONE blockchain. There might be forks. There might be disagreements over which is momentarily - right now - the correct info in the latest block. But in the end, there will only be one blockchain.

Since there is only one blockchain, the Bitcoin client could be adapted to gradually drop off all blockchain info from, say, before two years ago. Two years of proof should be enough. That is the standard in law for things like insurance and trusts, anyway.

At the same time, anyone could keep and maintain the whole thing if he wanted.

The Bitcoin client could be tweaked to have this as an option.

Yeah, there was a time when games were written in a relatively high-level language such as C++, but then they would go in and optimize specific sections of the code in a much lower level language (typically assembly language) to make it as efficient as possible. Nowadays the thinking is that since computers are so powerful, it's a waste of time and expertise to do that, so they just churn out sloppy code in a high level language and waste a ton of resources.  I do not like this trend either.

Also, the level of skill in the average programmer now vs 10 years ago is appalling... now just about any retard that managed to graduate college with even the most rudimentary understanding of programming can get a job.

I have lost count of the number of threads asking this same question. I usually don't bother answering but this time I will. The simple answer is blockchain pruning. Old spent transactions buried under enough blocks can be trimmed from the blockchain. Satoshi mentioned this as a method for reclaiming disk space in the original white paper. However, it's easier said than done now that the network is already several years old, and all the unspent "dust" transactions limit the effectiveness of blockchain pruning. I personally believe the real solution to scalability in decentralized cryptocurrency can be achieved with a system like my mini-blockchain scheme. But I wont bother explaining how it works in this thread, if you're interested in the details then read the wiki: http://bitfreak.info/mbc-wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

Nah there isn't, but if the Bitcoin dev team don't solve it someone else might that's my point, I mean look at Litecoin, while it's not hugely revolutionary or anything somebody came out with a coin that only GPU's ( at least so far ) could mine and then there's stuff like Primecoin and Peercoin, I'm definitely grateful that the code for Bitcoin was released open source.

I agree this is a major problem we're going to have to solve (and that software bloat sucks!), but I'm not sure what you mean about the altcoins. There isn't any that has solved Bitcoin's scalability issues, except by having many fewer transactions to deal with, is there?

This is becoming a serious problem now, rather than adapting their code programmers everywhere just shrug and expect their customers to buy high end PCs that easily cost over £800, for a lot of people it isn't realistic to do that for most things because they're on a budget. Games are a perfect example that I'm worried about because rather than just deciding on a certain number of polygons etc. to use programmers now are just vomiting effects all over the screen and expecting people to buy high end systems to cope with it, this is just sloppy coding practice and bad forethought it will also drive a lot of customers away that don't want to spend the money on these systems just to play usually one or two games on it a bit like the whole console exclusives problem.

Nevermind games, if you're going to do this to someone with a business with software they use and force them to get several hundred pounds of equipment just so they can cope with it until the next software comes out which will require another machine you're just going to get the middle finger. I think that the Bitcoin dev team are more intelligent than this but this is precisely why I support altcoins and wouldn't have taken an interest in Bitcoin if it wasn't open source, somebody will find a more efficient solution to the blockchain taking up so much space if they won't.

You might make companies like Intel and AMD happy with that kind of attitude but everybody else is going to hate it.

Multibit is less secure though. It seems that most methods of reducing the storage requirement involve accepting a higher level of risk.

I am using multibit , it is not downloading every thing.

Interesting, I should read up on that. Kinda sounds like torrent, except you don't end up downloading the whole thing.

Exactly, that's the only realistic long term solution.
Each node holds random parts of the blockchain, but all nodes together will have redundancy

Or use SPV wallets
Once the blockchain is too big to be hosted on a single node, it might be split, and spread so each node only hosts a fraction.

Buy 8TB external HDD for Bitcoin data directory and be prepared for next 6 or 7 years of blockchain growth! Or buy the second-hand 8TB drive 5 years from now for couple of dollars.

You assume technology stops evolving?

Because in 2005, 4 GIG of Ram was ALOT. 

I don't know the right terminology to use, but I believe the next major version of bitcoin has something to reduce the amount of data needed to be stored.

The bitcoin app already takes up a hefty amount of hard drive space. What is going to happen in a few years when it gets even larger? As people have more and more cryptocoin wallets on their PCs, space could become an issue... Is there any way around this?