Topic: What will eventually happen if/when the blockchain reaches unmanageable size? (Read 843 times)

Many thanks to all the concise, knowledgeable and polite answers to my questions; many things bugging me for a long time have been cleared up. Thanks, guys.

russell

quick answer: the hell will freeze

seriously, there are lite clients which dont require the blockchain to download - this will work for those who dont want to download gigabyes of data and process shitload of verifying operations

I asked myself the exactly same question, and found this

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.34469

a good discussion of the relevant numbers. An important point to keep in mind is that - in principle - it is possible to purge unneeded information from old blocks. As I understand it, this is information on bitcoins transactions of which have occured in a number of newer blocks. (This is mentioned already in the Satoshi paper, although I did not understand it there.) This way, a slimmer but equally safe version of the block-chain can be constructed. My understanding is that block-chain compression is not implemented yet, but could be if necessity arises. See here

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.45042

xoyyox

You already have that option by your choice of client (e.g. use one of the other clients such as Multibit or Electrum rather than the Satoshi one) - but what is being built under the hood now is much better than just a choice of "lite" or "full".

option for lite client or full blockchain client would be good based how much bandwich/HDD space user want to use

There is a lot of work going on to solve this problem by the devs - you can expect in a not too distant future version of the Satoshi client to be able to specify the amount of disk space you want to use to hold the parts of the blockchain that you need (which should be fairly minimal for most users).

Hopefully not.


That's the general assumption.


With the current protocol? No.  The protocol sets a maximum block size of 1 megabyte.  The protocol adjusts the mining difficulty automatically to keep the average rate of new block generation close to ten minutes.

This means that the blockchain shouldn't grow much faster than 6 megabytes per hour (52.6 gigabytes per year).  At that rate it will take 19 years to fill a 1 terabyte drive.  What are the odds that consumer storage capabilities will exceed 1 terabyte in the next 19 years?


Perhaps in the future there will be a lightweight wallet that provides security nearly as good as Armory.


In the world of bitcoin, "confirmation" is just another way to say "a block added to the blockchain".  Every time a new block is added to the blockchain with new transactions in it, all the transactions that are already embedded in older blocks are said to have "another confirmation".  There isn't any new information stored for those old transactions, they just have one more block above them.


It depends on the client, but in most cases yes.


Faster start-up time? Reduced internet bandwidth use?

Howdy again.

Okay, still trying to get a handle on this stuff. My question is, as the topic said, what's going to happen a few years down the road with the blockchain? It's already pretty damn big. At what point will it overwhelm the average computer/network? Ever? Will computer/network capabilities continue to keep ahead of it? Won't it grow at an exponential rate if the great unwashed continues to adopt BtC at an ever increasing rate? I can afford ten, twenty or even fifty gigs to it, but if it ever hits a terrabyte, I'm going to go outside and play. It already takes five or ten minutes just for Armory to read the blockchain when I start it up.

One thing I don't understand is the number of confirmations that the blockchain seems to be clogged with. I have transactions a year old or so that have thousands of confirmations by now. Why is that necessary? Armory advises me to wait for six before I trust a transaction, so why the hell are there thousands? Isn't that extreme overkill? Aren't all those entries in the blockchain? Doesn't that bloat it a bit?

Another question concerns clients that don't need the whole blockchain saved to disk... Of course, they still have to "process" the whole blockchain, correct? When you first install such a client, it has to read the whole blockchain to see what in there is yours, right? Basically, such a client still reads the whole blockchain, it just doesn't save everything to disk, just what affects your account. Am I understanding that correctly? Is there any advantage here other than saving a few gigs of disk space?

Apologies as surely this has been discussed here or elsewhere by now; I just haven't chanced onto it.

russell