Topic: What will happen with Bitcoin as the blockchain increases in size over time? (Read 1568 times)

1) thats not going to be a problem,
storage
we already know 4tb hard drives are available, they are not specialist equipment only available to the elite. they are consumer level availability so no concern. knowing average consumers upgrade their computer every 4 years means that 4tb can handle ~18mb blocks. so knowing this next year we are only gonna get 2-4mb blocks and then waste another year or 3 debating what to do after 2-4mb.. we wont reach 18mb blocks thus 4tb hard drives are more then what is needed. and in 4 years bigger hard drives will be available.
eg 20 years ago 4gb hard drives were the max consumer level, now its 4tb. in 20 years it will be alot more. so no worries
bandwidth
telecommunications companies have a 5 year plan/roadmap. cellular companies have 5G as their plan and landline have fibre as their plan. the maths also shows they both will outpace what we will need for bitcoin. afterall playing an online game while live streaming it and teamspeaking to team mates is the norm and requires more bandwidth than bitcoin. yet we dont see twitch, activision, crying and refusing to run services. they are happily running for millions of people. yet funnily core are refusing and using fake stats to hold off.. remember their 2mb is bad.. but now suddenly 4mb is good. even the pools are telling core to shut up an stop using the 'chinese firewall' as an excuse, because the firewall is not a probem.

2) fully syncing
that can be solved easily. torrents, pre-setup hard drives(you copy the blockdata from old hard drive to new hard drive then only sync the last few days you wasted setting up new pc)

3) supporting the network
as for limiting an average person??
not a problem either.
what pee's the average person off is not the download time because thats a background thing. what pee's them off is how core is not fully functional until its fully synced. by this i mean it doesnt display live balance and doesnt like to make transactions while not synced.
thus people blame the sync time, rather then blame how core set up the GUI interface to function only after syncing
 this can be solved by core requesting data about the users imported keys first and then allow the user to actually make transactions, and then grab the historic data after. thus users are not waiting for it to sync first. EG run in lite mode until synced. rather than waiting to sync to then get users to choose full or lite mode. its easy to program and not a bitcoin issue but rather a core decision they can make to enhance their GUI (user interface) side of core.

4) the incentive exists.
its called securing your own funds by not relying on third party services. there does not need to be a financial payment incentive. also having 2 million full nodes running actually counteracts the equilibrium of security by requiring more connections which requires more hops/delays in getting to everyone in a reasonable time. so 10k nodes is safer and healthier than 2 million. as long as those 10k are not sybil nodes (fake/running from a clustered single location(amazon aws))

Well if storage capacity and network speed growth goes in par over the next years, then there should be nothing to worry about. Still, the more the blockchain grows, the longer it will take for a node to fully sync, thus limiting any average person to get started away and support the Bitcoin network without any incentive involved.

Nevertheless, I hope that the Bitcoin blockchain would continue to grow, and maintain itself for years to come by. I'm looking forward for more scalable solutions to become a reality, to increase Bitcoin transactions speeds and capacity, making it the largest network in the cryptocurrency space. Just my thoughts. 

segwit is not offering much more then we are already getting
their estimates are ONLY if 100% of users use segwit tx's

all this doomsday crap like 2mb is bad.. then suddenly core say 4mb is acceptable, yet still keeping legacy tx's at 1mb... is just bait and switch crap to delay real scaling to sell people on the idea that bitcoin onchain and LN will cost people alot to use.

rather than actually scale bitcoin they are trying to push people down a small thin straw and syphon people away from the permissionless onchain mechanism we know and love.

That is certainly true, but I have the sense that once SegWit and other scalable solutions like Lightning Network become active, more users will come into Bitcoin, thus increasing the rate of growth of the blockchain.

But as long as storage capacity and network speeds grow in par over time, then it should be nothing to worry about. After all, the main issue that we're facing with Bitcoin nowadays is scalability, and privacy. Just sharing my thoughts   

main fake doomsday

"today bitcoins 7 years of world wide borderless transactions of millions of people is huge"
"file storage will need data centres in the next dacade"
"file storage wont grow fast enough to cope"

..
yea todays accumulation of 7 years bitcoin data is the size of........ a fingernail,
grow up and stop crying

They will argue and fight for years how to fix like block szie debate now. ha ha

Interesting fact. As interest and demand grows into Bitcoin, the speed of the blockchain's size growth would be much greater thus making it more difficult for anyone to setup a node due to the fact that storage capacity does not lower as time goes by.

In contrast, if storage can keep up with Moore's law, the we can expect to see no issues when setting up a node as for having the capacity for storing the full blockchain data, as well as be able to sync faster as Internet speeds increase over time.

Nevertheless, I hope that the ever growing blockchain size won't be a major issue towards the decentralization of Bitcoin, rendering it nearly inaccessible for everyday users to setup and run a full node at their homes. Just my opinion. 

That is also a big concern, since data grows significantly also. But I think there is a wallet like electrum  that do not need to download the whole data,but I hope in the near future this can be addressed properly together with transaction speed.

Do keep in mind that we cannot assume increases in transfer rates and storage capacity and chip speed  will continue as they have in the past. We've already seen a major slowdown over the past 5 years and the die size plateau is drawing ever nearer. This highlights the need for off-chain solutions like LN, even if we don't push for bitcoin to go mainstream.

Google the subject 'End of Moore's Law' for some info on this subject (for example, http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/moores-law-really-is-dead-this-time/). I think there is room yet for secondary refinements and improvements that will give us a few percent more performance here and there, and quantum computing is a big unknown, but we can't count on the old trajectories continuing in the future without a big leap of faith.

Mr. Satoshi had mentioned about "Reclaiming Disk Space" in his abstract itself. I am not sure about why it is not already happening as we do see everyday the size of blockchain is keeping on increasing.

Here is the abstract on bitcoin system : https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

In my understanding it has not been implemented yet as cost of storage does get decreased over time.

Currently bitcoin blockchain is around 100 GB, anyone can buy 1TB+ worth of Hard disk for $50 and internet packages are also quite cheaper these days and it will be more cheaper in future along with cheaper hard disk/disk space. So i don't think that blockchain size will be bigger issue for the growth of bitcoin in future, however people from underdeveloped countries may struggle to download whole bitcoin blockchain due to very slow internet speed.

Solution for this could be distributing/selling CD or Pendrive with updated blockchain database so that there will be no need to download whole blockchain database to setup new node.

Correct, so far we have seen the data capacity and disk space technologies keeping up with the need, but things change quickly. We have

seen some statistics lately that the demand is much higher than the supply, and the growth cannot keep up with the demand. Have a look at

this : https://www.telegeography.com/research-services/global-bandwidth-research-service/

We might have a problem in the future, but the service providers will manage this with higher fees and capped accounts and also throttling.

Exactly. That is one of the many things that I'm concerned with, because even though storage capacity increases over time, the growth of internet speed takes even longer, resulting in an unbalanced situation of storage and network bandwidth.

However, if network speeds could become improved, then it should be no problem at all for nodes to be able to quickly sync no matter the size of the blockchain. In addition to this, all of this could be worse if blockchain size grows even faster than expected if more users join in the Bitcoin network. 



Yeah. As storage capacity increases over time, there is still one issue, and it is that the network bandwidth/speeds do not have the same growth rate as storage, thus making it troublesome to sync in less time even though you would have the biggest storage capacity on earth. But, if the growth rate would go on par with storage, then there should be no issue for the blockchain to continue to expand as time goes by.

As long as scalabilty solutions won't affect Bitcoin's decentralization, then everything should be fine. 

This isn't a great problem, I can assure you that. I don't know if you've been in computers and so for a long time, but if yes and that you've gave attention to the releases of the new computer parts, you must have noticed that the computer space has been greatly increasing over the time, and the price declined a lot, following Trip Hawkins' "law". The price of the terabyte will continue to decline, and by 2020 I think that we will be at about 25$ per terabyte (we're at something like 35$ now). So place won't be a problem.
For bandwith to fill up all that storage, I don't think that it will be a problem too, considering that 5G is coming in 2020. I know that's a mobile network, but the common internet network should follow the same way of a very very high speed future.

There are not that many options. Making the blockchain smaller is one, but not very realistic. So this leaves us with bigger storage, which depends on the technology, but we can assume from history that this will not be a problem. Bandwidth and transfer limits are more problematic as they depend a lot on the region you life in. The amount of money involved in Bitcoin should be enough so that a solution will be found in time if necessary.

I think a couple of things will happen.

More people will decide to run pruned nodes.

We will see trusted sources of copies of the blockchain for new people who want to set up a full node - you heard it from Kuffy, there is a business oportunity for someone to supply the Bitcoin blockchain on a stick..

I guess at some point most wallets should be "light" wallet so they don't need to sync with whole data. It is a pain to sync the full data, even after a week's time. It just takes too long. Sync'ing from scratch is a night mare because of the huge amount of data.

if you think in a world of online gaming HD broadcasting and facetime calling. that 5400 nodes are even putting a dent into the transcontinental/intercontinental fibre limits.. then you need to get a job on the comedy circuit.

as for africa. i hav done some stuff there in remote places.. and where a solar panel and a RaspbrryPi3 and a 4G 'dongle' is a cheap solution.. africans laugh that technology is not the problem. the transaction fee is

but yea lets address the op's question

in short: bitcoin 'data' does not have a problem
bitcoin data is not a world concern. the transaction fee is
expanding block sizes allows more transactions which allows the fee to not spike/increase so fast thus allowing more people to desire bitcoins utility.
the bloat caused by that growth is of no harm

No Franki1, I can tell you, those are more the exception than the rule. I work on contract basis in African countries for a few months every year, and when we are operating from there, we have
bad internet access and the electricity supply is also a problem. We have to run backup generators and UPS's combos 24/4 to keep things going. It is not as straight forward as you are saying,
because the inter-continetal fiber access restrict the amount of internet that can be re-distributed to the public. Bandwidht will be a problem, but I think OP is talking about Disk space.  

i have seen in places like africa, Ukraine, mongolia, russia, brazil, to name just a few 'poor' areas where playing call of duty while livestreaming is not an issue.

i have seen thousands of thousands of people in those countries making youtube video's, facetiming, and doing many bandwidth heavy tasks.
we are not in the dark ages where it takes 2 minutes to load a aol homepage anymore.

internet speeds are not slow. they can however be throttled down by your ISP playing the greedy game of dropping supply to make people pay extra.
if your ISP has no 5 year plan to up its average cap. then start looking for a new ISP.

though its not a need now. ISP's should not be holding its customers to ransom. so you have plenty of years to switch to a different ISP, but in general ISP's should all have a 5 year plan.

even the mobile/cellular networks have a 5 year plan.. 5G will be more then people need in the next 5 years than bitcoin will require in 10 years. meaning no issue.

dont blame bitcoin for your ISP's caps. blame your choice of ISP