8 ms·

What will BTC or ETH hard drive usage look like 100 years from now? Has anyone run the numbers? It seems like the disk usage will become untenable, but maybe s

by shawn 9y ago

What will BTC or ETH hard drive usage look like 100 years from now? Has anyone run the numbers? It seems like the disk usage will become untenable, but maybe someone has a plan to deal with it.

mdotk 9y ago
Please tell me you're joking
godzillabrennus 9y ago
Ken M must have a new name...
mimerme 9y ago
It's mentioned in the BTC whitepaper. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf Scroll to section 7 "Reclaiming Disk Space"
- gruez 9y ago
  at the current rate of ~55GB /year, running a full block client shouldn't be too hard, even on SSDs
QAPereo 9y ago
This shit won’t even be a distant memory in 100 years, unless it’s a object lesson in greed and groupthink.
- Klathmon 9y ago
  This isn't a useful comment in any sense of the word. If you think cryptocurrencies are just a fad, that's fine, but you don't need to inject your feelings into any discussion of it.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    I didn’t, I responded honestly and completely to a ridiculous question. Your distaste for the answer doesn’t bother me.
    - Klathmon 9y ago
      You answered a question that the user didn't ask. If you feel they won't be around, that's fine. But if the discussion is about how hard drive usage will scale over many years, injecting "it won't matter" is a pointless comment. It not only doesn't answer the question, but it provides basically no information other than your feelings on a subject. It's exactly the thing I come to HN to avoid.
      - QAPereo 9y ago
        Avoiding something is as easy as moving your eyes past it. You’re not avoiding, you’re engaging and attempting to dictate. Have a nice night.
- chrisco255 9y ago
  So you think we'll still be using 19th century style fiat in the 22nd century?
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    > you think we'll still be using 19th century style fiat in the 22nd century? No, but we can sure as hell come up with something better than this.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    Personally I suspect we’ll be hunting rats for meat, but sure, that’s another option. Fortunately I don’t actually have to limit myself to the false dichotomy of Eth/Btc or “19th century fiat.”
  - loeg 9y ago
    18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st century style fiat? Yes, I think we will continue to use that in the 22nd century.
    - chrisco255 9y ago
      I don't know what the world will look like 83 years from now, but I would bet money that the world is using crypto for currency. How about we make a bet on it? You know what, let's place our bet in a time locked smart contract and have the money automatically disperse to our descendents in the year 2100.
- dang 9y ago
  Would you please stop posting flamebait to HN? Obviously this is the last thing we need here. We've warned you many times about breaking the site rules. I appreciate the solid submissions you've posted but if you continue to wreck HN threads by trolling them, in effect if not intent, the negative outweighs the positive.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    Look at this thread... the only thread on this entire submission, all stemming from the same post. I’m not the one posting flamebait, and I wasn’t the first to react with incredulous disgust. If you want to improve this site, I’d start to crack down on non-technical submissions about cryptocurrency. They’re as bad as stories about Trump for predictable bullshit, and equally predictable squabbles along ideological or self-interested lines. It’s a cross between boring and grotesque that so much time is spent here saying essentially nothing about the latest ICO scams or currency forks. What part of this is intellectually satisfying or engaging? Worse, the daily dozen+ front page stories about this crap displace genuinely interesting submissions and discussions.
    - dang 9y ago
      Such objections and advice carry no weight when you bring them up just to evade your own breakage of the rules. If you want your ideas about HN to be taken seriously, first take basic responsibility and then show that you can use this site as intended, by actually doing so.
      - QAPereo 9y ago
        Have you ever had success in life or online with that tone? Really?
Klathmon 9y ago
Well that's exactly what both cryptocurrencies are currently working feverishly to solve. Bitcoin's idea is to use Lightning Network to keep the extreme majority of transactions from ever having to hit the blockchain. And it's also why the blocksize shouldn't be increased like some forks are doing, because in 100 years (or even 5 years) the size will be unmanageable. I believe ETH has something similar, but I'm not knowledgeable enough about that ecosystem to say either way. It's clear to everyone that the blockchain as a "data structure" isn't scalable to anything resembling "widespread usage", and that it will be a hard requirement to figure out how to either quickly and safely "prune" information from a blockchain, or get most of the transactions to stay off of it somehow. Also, I'm sad that most of the replies to your comment are jokes or comments about how it won't matter, or how you are dumb for even asking the question. It seems when it comes to cryptocurrencies HN is just as bad as other forums online that everyone resorts to insults and "witty" one liners.
- binocarlos 9y ago
  The eth devs are busy working on sharding - the same idea as traditional databases like Mongo where a primary key decides which node the data will reside. The main problem here is that a contract residing on shard A might reference a contract on shard B (much like a join between 2 shards). They are approaching this by using "transaction receipts" that would be passed from shard to shard. https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQ https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQ
  - Klathmon 9y ago
    Don't they have something roughly equivalent to the Lightning Network on ETH called the Raiden Network as well? Or am I misunderstanding that?
    - binocarlos 9y ago
      Indeed - Raiden is all about payment channels - funds are deposited on the main chain and then payments can be sent over channels with no fee. Only in the case of dispute or cashing out is the main chain used to resolve the conflict. This means you could make many transactions per second of very small amounts (useful for things like gambling sites or micro-payments for content). Micro-Raiden is already active which are one-to-one payment channels - the full Raiden network is not yet live but will facilitate one-to-many channels. * https://raiden.network/faq.html https://raiden.network/faq.html * https://raiden.network/micro.html https://raiden.network/micro.html
elmar 9y ago
Well if Bitcoin Cash gets to VISA level transactions quantity they will have around 1GB block every 10 minutes, who will be able to run a full mining node?, 2 to 3 corporations worldwide, probably centralized in some geographical region for lower communication latency.
- zik 9y ago
  The "Gigablock Initiative" presented at the recent "Scaling Bitcoin" conference tests exactly that. They found that Bitcoin Cash can easily scale on chain to VISA levels using standard desktop machines. https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-unlimited-reveals-gigablock-testnet-performance/ https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-unlimited-reveals-gigablock... The same would apply to Bitcoin scaling on chain.
- mrep 9y ago
  Easy peazy. Just convert each node to a cryptographic sql server. Once that reaches its limit, use a multinode nosql/newsql pocket cluster. Most people already have the compute, memory, storage, and network infrastructure to support that nowadays.
- ta30001 9y ago
  Using a 3TB, $70 drive from NewEgg as an example, HDD costs for full 1GB blocks would be $3.36/day, today. Surely more than 2-3 corporations can afford that.
  - nikcub 9y ago
    The RRP of a terabyte of hard drive on NewEgg has almost nothing to do with the cost of provisioning an additional reliable terabyte of datacenter storage + IOPS
  - bike4beer 9y ago
    It's not a storage problem, right now at block 530,000 BTC, and ethereum at block 4,900,00 its pretty much a so what about size, btc is about 200gb and eth is about 100gb SIZE of the storage on the block is not the problem, the problem IMHO is that the 'go' implementation of ETH doesn't truth other clients, BTC is wild-wild west where its fairly fast to 'sync', maybe 4 days at 50 MB/sec, and your synced at the current block for mining, but on ETH you can run a full-node for weeks if not months and never 'sync', I have full-nodes that I started weeks ago with --fast, and they still have NEVER caught up with the current node, NOW IMHO here's the deal, the reason that they don't catch up, is that in ETH some nodes are more equal than others, some nodes have 4 legs, some have 2 legs ( animal farm ) this all goes back to BUTERIN who believes that only trusted animals can have the current block-chain, the others simply play 'catch-up' To give an example I have full-nodes running on --fast mode that are finding new blocks slower than they're being mined, which means that that the longer I run the full node the more I fall behind. Now a good mother might ask?? WHy would this be? AGain, its a matter of 'trust' ETH is largely about paranoia, and BTC is largely about trusting the unknown; BTC is working ETH is not, I think because ETH is ran by a child "BUTERIN" and nobody has the guts to call him on his stupid view of the world ( mainly because he still thinks like a 14 year old computer genius ) BUTERIN, like so many of his ilk, never worked in industry, never bothered to understand 'scaling' or real problems of the real world, and certainly never bought into the view of NSA ( SATOSHI ) that BTC was supposed to be by 'consensus', one of the things if you follow ETH you will learn quickly is ETH is a NANNY and BUTERIN is the mother. In summary ETH has failed because it is 180 opposed to the anarchy of Nakamota-SAtoshi(NSA), there is nothing libertarian about ETH, its just a classic example of investors putting blind trust in a child and I saw this many times when I was young, older people with no technical knowledge following conmen.
martindale 9y ago
Here's an up-to-date comparison of Bitcoin and Ethereum's cumulative blockchain size: http://bc.daniel.net.nz/ http://bc.daniel.net.nz/
- notyourwork 9y ago
  Would be nice to see transaction throughput next to these.
- DennisP 9y ago
  But that's with a full copy of the state of every block, which is redundant and only needed for efficient historical queries. If you just want to fully verify the current state, all you need is the block headers, the current state, and all the transactions, which adds up to about 30GB.
- CryptoPunk 9y ago
  That's wrong: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6zcoja/10_gb_in_2_days_as_a_bitcoiner_serious_question/dmuglq3/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6zcoja/10_gb_in_2...
  - martindale 9y ago
    It's correct for full nodes, which is the point.
    - CryptoPunk 9y ago
      Full nodes include nodes that don't store intermediate state. Storage of intermediate state is optional in Ethereum. It's not even possible in Bitcoin. An apt comparison is between Ethereum full nodes that don't store intermediate state and Bitcoin full nodes.
    - mbrock 9y ago
      Please stop being confidently wrong about this.
DINKDINK 9y ago
Actual disk-storage-use* data here: https://anduck.net/bitcoincore_vs_geth_full_node_stats.png https://anduck.net/bitcoincore_vs_geth_full_node_stats.png Ethereum's blockchain has a growth rate 2X bitcoin's. If it continues to grow at this pace, it'll eclipse 1 TB in size in 2018. If you aren't verifying the blockchain that you're reading and writing to, then you're using a trusted third party. If you're using a trusted third party, why are you even using a blockchain to begin with? Even BitGo, a commercial payment company, has trouble maintaining datacenter servers that can keep up with the io demands of running an Ethereum node. [1] Doesn't bode well for the long-term viability of ethereum. Bitcoin's philosophy has been, rather than broadcast every single state update to every single network participant (an unscalable network design approach[2]) [1] The Challenges of Building Ethereum Infrastructure https://medium.com/@lopp/the-challenges-of-building-ethereum-infrastructure-87e443e47a4b https://medium.com/@lopp/the-challenges-of-building-ethereum... [2] Lightning Network enables Unicast Transactions in Bitcoin. Lightning is Bitcoin’s TCP/IP stack. https://medium.com/@melik_87377/lightning-network-enables-unicast-transactions-in-bitcoin-lightning-is-bitcoins-tcp-ip-stack-8ec1d42c14f5 https://medium.com/@melik_87377/lightning-network-enables-un... *Storage is only one part of the scaling engineering issues. Also important is the CPU and time requirements to keep a blockchain node synced.
- pmorici 9y ago
  If you aren't verifying the block chain you don't have to rely on a trusted third party. You ask a third party and then check with a couple other third parties to verify what the first gave you. Big difference.
- Simon_says 9y ago
  Having authority be federated is a vast improvement. It's not hard to understand that I might be willing to pick an authority I trust out of a pool of the entire globe when I might not be willing to trust the authority of the US government and a handful of proximate banks.
- wmf 9y ago
  You're ignoring pruning, which appears to reduce disk usage from ~1TB to ~30GB.
idlewords 9y ago
Something tells me it won't be a problem.
stale2002 9y ago
Storage costs have massively gone down over the last X decades. A Terra byte hard drive will sell for ~40 dollars these days. In 2 decades maybe that will be a petabyte drive going for 40$.
- tzahola 9y ago
  * terabyte, not “Terra byte”
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Tepix 9y ago
I suggest your read this: https://medium.com/@preethikasireddy/how-does-ethereum-work-anyway-22d1df506369 https://medium.com/@preethikasireddy/how-does-ethereum-work-... Quote: But unless a node needs to execute every transaction or easily query historical data, there’s really no need to store the entire chain. This is where the concept of a light node comes in. Instead of downloading and storing the full chain and executing all of the transactions, light nodes download only the chain of headers, from the genesis block to the current head, without executing any transactions or retrieving any associated state. Because light nodes have access to block headers, which contain hashes of three tries, they can still easily generate and receive verifiable answers about transactions, events, balances, etc. The reason this works is because hashes in the Merkle tree propagate upward — if a malicious user attempts to swap a fake transaction into the bottom of a Merkle tree, this change will cause a change in the hash of the node above, which will change the hash of the node above that, and so on, until it eventually changes the root of the tree.
- elmar 9y ago
  A voice against light-client nodes "Peter Todd, a Bitcoin Core developer, concerns what we can say is a fundamental technical argument from small blockers. They argue we can not scale on-chain, because we can not have light-client nodes, because we can not construct what is called fraud proofs." Vitalik Buterin and Peter Todd Go Head to Head in the Crypto Culture Wars http://www.trustnodes.com/2017/08/14/vitalik-buterin-peter-todd-go-head-head-crypto-culture-wars http://www.trustnodes.com/2017/08/14/vitalik-buterin-peter-t... << Fraud Proofs explanation >> How Fraud Proofs May Improve SPV Node Security in Bitcoin https://coinjournal.net/how-fraud-proofs-may-improve-spv-node-security-in-bitcoin/ https://coinjournal.net/how-fraud-proofs-may-improve-spv-nod...
bike4beer 9y ago
Run the num's? Ok, I will talk about them num's I run 24/7 for years both full nodes for ethereum and bitcoin, when you first start up it takes about 4-5 days for bitcoin on 50mb/s fiber to 'catch-up', but with ethereum, I have 4 nodes running on site with different config, and some going on months and still running at block's 10k-100k behind the current block, go figure?? What is the problem? Go google 'syncing ethereum' you will get all kinds of advice to delete all your files, and run --fast, which is just the chain and not the blocks, ... but ok, you still don't sync for real, Then there is the C++ issue, ETH has discontinued C++ and gone with 'GO', ok, but here'e the real deal killer. ETHEREUM say's 'cryptography by obscurity', thus they don't document anything and deny everything and nobody knows what's going on, now some people would call this 'incompetence' in another lifetime ( I was writing c++ compilers in early 1980's ) The problem with both BTC & ETH is the hype because of the wealth 'effect' makes everyone blind to the problems, ... which just means one thing to an 'old timer' this is great time for other's to jump ahead and resolve the problems. Here's another deal about ETH, BUTERIN at 14 won a coding COMP, hell were we all not child prodigy's?? Then at 19 he wrote the BITCOIN python library, and then didn't fit into core so went on to 'make' ethereum, ... IMHO BUTERIN has no base, and is largely self taught, so who cares what he thinks or does ( topic of this article ) But to the real issue is that ETH has TERRIBLE problems, and the biggest problem is that the CORE (BUTERIN) doesn't trust and hates its users ( the 'obscurity is safety principal' ) again, the idea is if they don't tell the truth no bad people can harm them, but the problem of course is because they don't tell the truth they surround themselves with liars, "YES MEN". ETH is a basked case of problems, and of course BTC is not far behind, BITCOIN 2.0 will jump to 3.0 and leave all this crap behind, Jump forward men, all you fear to lose is your chains.

by shawn 9y ago

What will BTC or ETH hard drive usage look like 100 years from now? Has anyone run the numbers? It seems like the disk usage will become untenable, but maybe someone has a plan to deal with it.

mdotk 9y ago

Please tell me you're joking

godzillabrennus 9y ago

Ken M must have a new name...

mimerme 9y ago

It's mentioned in the BTC whitepaper. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf Scroll to section 7 "Reclaiming Disk Space"

gruez 9y ago
at the current rate of ~55GB /year, running a full block client shouldn't be too hard, even on SSDs

QAPereo 9y ago

This shit won’t even be a distant memory in 100 years, unless it’s a object lesson in greed and groupthink.

Klathmon 9y ago
This isn't a useful comment in any sense of the word. If you think cryptocurrencies are just a fad, that's fine, but you don't need to inject your feelings into any discussion of it.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  I didn’t, I responded honestly and completely to a ridiculous question. Your distaste for the answer doesn’t bother me.
  - Klathmon 9y ago
    You answered a question that the user didn't ask. If you feel they won't be around, that's fine. But if the discussion is about how hard drive usage will scale over many years, injecting "it won't matter" is a pointless comment. It not only doesn't answer the question, but it provides basically no information other than your feelings on a subject. It's exactly the thing I come to HN to avoid.
    - QAPereo 9y ago
      Avoiding something is as easy as moving your eyes past it. You’re not avoiding, you’re engaging and attempting to dictate. Have a nice night.
chrisco255 9y ago
So you think we'll still be using 19th century style fiat in the 22nd century?
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > you think we'll still be using 19th century style fiat in the 22nd century? No, but we can sure as hell come up with something better than this.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  Personally I suspect we’ll be hunting rats for meat, but sure, that’s another option. Fortunately I don’t actually have to limit myself to the false dichotomy of Eth/Btc or “19th century fiat.”
- loeg 9y ago
  18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st century style fiat? Yes, I think we will continue to use that in the 22nd century.
  - chrisco255 9y ago
    I don't know what the world will look like 83 years from now, but I would bet money that the world is using crypto for currency. How about we make a bet on it? You know what, let's place our bet in a time locked smart contract and have the money automatically disperse to our descendents in the year 2100.
dang 9y ago
Would you please stop posting flamebait to HN? Obviously this is the last thing we need here. We've warned you many times about breaking the site rules. I appreciate the solid submissions you've posted but if you continue to wreck HN threads by trolling them, in effect if not intent, the negative outweighs the positive.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  Look at this thread... the only thread on this entire submission, all stemming from the same post. I’m not the one posting flamebait, and I wasn’t the first to react with incredulous disgust. If you want to improve this site, I’d start to crack down on non-technical submissions about cryptocurrency. They’re as bad as stories about Trump for predictable bullshit, and equally predictable squabbles along ideological or self-interested lines. It’s a cross between boring and grotesque that so much time is spent here saying essentially nothing about the latest ICO scams or currency forks. What part of this is intellectually satisfying or engaging? Worse, the daily dozen+ front page stories about this crap displace genuinely interesting submissions and discussions.
  - dang 9y ago
    Such objections and advice carry no weight when you bring them up just to evade your own breakage of the rules. If you want your ideas about HN to be taken seriously, first take basic responsibility and then show that you can use this site as intended, by actually doing so.
    - QAPereo 9y ago
      Have you ever had success in life or online with that tone? Really?

Klathmon 9y ago

Well that's exactly what both cryptocurrencies are currently working feverishly to solve. Bitcoin's idea is to use Lightning Network to keep the extreme majority of transactions from ever having to hit the blockchain. And it's also why the blocksize shouldn't be increased like some forks are doing, because in 100 years (or even 5 years) the size will be unmanageable. I believe ETH has something similar, but I'm not knowledgeable enough about that ecosystem to say either way. It's clear to everyone that the blockchain as a "data structure" isn't scalable to anything resembling "widespread usage", and that it will be a hard requirement to figure out how to either quickly and safely "prune" information from a blockchain, or get most of the transactions to stay off of it somehow. Also, I'm sad that most of the replies to your comment are jokes or comments about how it won't matter, or how you are dumb for even asking the question. It seems when it comes to cryptocurrencies HN is just as bad as other forums online that everyone resorts to insults and "witty" one liners.

binocarlos 9y ago
The eth devs are busy working on sharding - the same idea as traditional databases like Mongo where a primary key decides which node the data will reside. The main problem here is that a contract residing on shard A might reference a contract on shard B (much like a join between 2 shards). They are approaching this by using "transaction receipts" that would be passed from shard to shard. https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQ https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQ
- Klathmon 9y ago
  Don't they have something roughly equivalent to the Lightning Network on ETH called the Raiden Network as well? Or am I misunderstanding that?
  - binocarlos 9y ago
    Indeed - Raiden is all about payment channels - funds are deposited on the main chain and then payments can be sent over channels with no fee. Only in the case of dispute or cashing out is the main chain used to resolve the conflict. This means you could make many transactions per second of very small amounts (useful for things like gambling sites or micro-payments for content). Micro-Raiden is already active which are one-to-one payment channels - the full Raiden network is not yet live but will facilitate one-to-many channels. * https://raiden.network/faq.html https://raiden.network/faq.html * https://raiden.network/micro.html https://raiden.network/micro.html

elmar 9y ago

Well if Bitcoin Cash gets to VISA level transactions quantity they will have around 1GB block every 10 minutes, who will be able to run a full mining node?, 2 to 3 corporations worldwide, probably centralized in some geographical region for lower communication latency.

zik 9y ago
The "Gigablock Initiative" presented at the recent "Scaling Bitcoin" conference tests exactly that. They found that Bitcoin Cash can easily scale on chain to VISA levels using standard desktop machines. https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-unlimited-reveals-gigablock-testnet-performance/ https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-unlimited-reveals-gigablock... The same would apply to Bitcoin scaling on chain.
mrep 9y ago
Easy peazy. Just convert each node to a cryptographic sql server. Once that reaches its limit, use a multinode nosql/newsql pocket cluster. Most people already have the compute, memory, storage, and network infrastructure to support that nowadays.
ta30001 9y ago
Using a 3TB, $70 drive from NewEgg as an example, HDD costs for full 1GB blocks would be $3.36/day, today. Surely more than 2-3 corporations can afford that.
- nikcub 9y ago
  The RRP of a terabyte of hard drive on NewEgg has almost nothing to do with the cost of provisioning an additional reliable terabyte of datacenter storage + IOPS
- bike4beer 9y ago
  It's not a storage problem, right now at block 530,000 BTC, and ethereum at block 4,900,00 its pretty much a so what about size, btc is about 200gb and eth is about 100gb SIZE of the storage on the block is not the problem, the problem IMHO is that the 'go' implementation of ETH doesn't truth other clients, BTC is wild-wild west where its fairly fast to 'sync', maybe 4 days at 50 MB/sec, and your synced at the current block for mining, but on ETH you can run a full-node for weeks if not months and never 'sync', I have full-nodes that I started weeks ago with --fast, and they still have NEVER caught up with the current node, NOW IMHO here's the deal, the reason that they don't catch up, is that in ETH some nodes are more equal than others, some nodes have 4 legs, some have 2 legs ( animal farm ) this all goes back to BUTERIN who believes that only trusted animals can have the current block-chain, the others simply play 'catch-up' To give an example I have full-nodes running on --fast mode that are finding new blocks slower than they're being mined, which means that that the longer I run the full node the more I fall behind. Now a good mother might ask?? WHy would this be? AGain, its a matter of 'trust' ETH is largely about paranoia, and BTC is largely about trusting the unknown; BTC is working ETH is not, I think because ETH is ran by a child "BUTERIN" and nobody has the guts to call him on his stupid view of the world ( mainly because he still thinks like a 14 year old computer genius ) BUTERIN, like so many of his ilk, never worked in industry, never bothered to understand 'scaling' or real problems of the real world, and certainly never bought into the view of NSA ( SATOSHI ) that BTC was supposed to be by 'consensus', one of the things if you follow ETH you will learn quickly is ETH is a NANNY and BUTERIN is the mother. In summary ETH has failed because it is 180 opposed to the anarchy of Nakamota-SAtoshi(NSA), there is nothing libertarian about ETH, its just a classic example of investors putting blind trust in a child and I saw this many times when I was young, older people with no technical knowledge following conmen.

martindale 9y ago

Here's an up-to-date comparison of Bitcoin and Ethereum's cumulative blockchain size: http://bc.daniel.net.nz/ http://bc.daniel.net.nz/

notyourwork 9y ago
Would be nice to see transaction throughput next to these.
DennisP 9y ago
But that's with a full copy of the state of every block, which is redundant and only needed for efficient historical queries. If you just want to fully verify the current state, all you need is the block headers, the current state, and all the transactions, which adds up to about 30GB.
CryptoPunk 9y ago
That's wrong: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6zcoja/10_gb_in_2_days_as_a_bitcoiner_serious_question/dmuglq3/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6zcoja/10_gb_in_2...
- martindale 9y ago
  It's correct for full nodes, which is the point.
  - CryptoPunk 9y ago
    Full nodes include nodes that don't store intermediate state. Storage of intermediate state is optional in Ethereum. It's not even possible in Bitcoin. An apt comparison is between Ethereum full nodes that don't store intermediate state and Bitcoin full nodes.
  - mbrock 9y ago
    Please stop being confidently wrong about this.

DINKDINK 9y ago

Actual disk-storage-use* data here: https://anduck.net/bitcoincore_vs_geth_full_node_stats.png https://anduck.net/bitcoincore_vs_geth_full_node_stats.png Ethereum's blockchain has a growth rate 2X bitcoin's. If it continues to grow at this pace, it'll eclipse 1 TB in size in 2018. If you aren't verifying the blockchain that you're reading and writing to, then you're using a trusted third party. If you're using a trusted third party, why are you even using a blockchain to begin with? Even BitGo, a commercial payment company, has trouble maintaining datacenter servers that can keep up with the io demands of running an Ethereum node. [1] Doesn't bode well for the long-term viability of ethereum. Bitcoin's philosophy has been, rather than broadcast every single state update to every single network participant (an unscalable network design approach[2]) [1] The Challenges of Building Ethereum Infrastructure https://medium.com/@lopp/the-challenges-of-building-ethereum-infrastructure-87e443e47a4b https://medium.com/@lopp/the-challenges-of-building-ethereum... [2] Lightning Network enables Unicast Transactions in Bitcoin. Lightning is Bitcoin’s TCP/IP stack. https://medium.com/@melik_87377/lightning-network-enables-unicast-transactions-in-bitcoin-lightning-is-bitcoins-tcp-ip-stack-8ec1d42c14f5 https://medium.com/@melik_87377/lightning-network-enables-un... *Storage is only one part of the scaling engineering issues. Also important is the CPU and time requirements to keep a blockchain node synced.

pmorici 9y ago
If you aren't verifying the block chain you don't have to rely on a trusted third party. You ask a third party and then check with a couple other third parties to verify what the first gave you. Big difference.
Simon_says 9y ago
Having authority be federated is a vast improvement. It's not hard to understand that I might be willing to pick an authority I trust out of a pool of the entire globe when I might not be willing to trust the authority of the US government and a handful of proximate banks.
wmf 9y ago
You're ignoring pruning, which appears to reduce disk usage from ~1TB to ~30GB.

idlewords 9y ago

Something tells me it won't be a problem.

stale2002 9y ago

Storage costs have massively gone down over the last X decades. A Terra byte hard drive will sell for ~40 dollars these days. In 2 decades maybe that will be a petabyte drive going for 40$.

tzahola 9y ago
* terabyte, not “Terra byte”

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Tepix 9y ago

I suggest your read this: https://medium.com/@preethikasireddy/how-does-ethereum-work-anyway-22d1df506369 https://medium.com/@preethikasireddy/how-does-ethereum-work-... Quote: But unless a node needs to execute every transaction or easily query historical data, there’s really no need to store the entire chain. This is where the concept of a light node comes in. Instead of downloading and storing the full chain and executing all of the transactions, light nodes download only the chain of headers, from the genesis block to the current head, without executing any transactions or retrieving any associated state. Because light nodes have access to block headers, which contain hashes of three tries, they can still easily generate and receive verifiable answers about transactions, events, balances, etc. The reason this works is because hashes in the Merkle tree propagate upward — if a malicious user attempts to swap a fake transaction into the bottom of a Merkle tree, this change will cause a change in the hash of the node above, which will change the hash of the node above that, and so on, until it eventually changes the root of the tree.

elmar 9y ago
A voice against light-client nodes "Peter Todd, a Bitcoin Core developer, concerns what we can say is a fundamental technical argument from small blockers. They argue we can not scale on-chain, because we can not have light-client nodes, because we can not construct what is called fraud proofs." Vitalik Buterin and Peter Todd Go Head to Head in the Crypto Culture Wars http://www.trustnodes.com/2017/08/14/vitalik-buterin-peter-todd-go-head-head-crypto-culture-wars http://www.trustnodes.com/2017/08/14/vitalik-buterin-peter-t... << Fraud Proofs explanation >> How Fraud Proofs May Improve SPV Node Security in Bitcoin https://coinjournal.net/how-fraud-proofs-may-improve-spv-node-security-in-bitcoin/ https://coinjournal.net/how-fraud-proofs-may-improve-spv-nod...

bike4beer 9y ago

Run the num's? Ok, I will talk about them num's I run 24/7 for years both full nodes for ethereum and bitcoin, when you first start up it takes about 4-5 days for bitcoin on 50mb/s fiber to 'catch-up', but with ethereum, I have 4 nodes running on site with different config, and some going on months and still running at block's 10k-100k behind the current block, go figure?? What is the problem? Go google 'syncing ethereum' you will get all kinds of advice to delete all your files, and run --fast, which is just the chain and not the blocks, ... but ok, you still don't sync for real, Then there is the C++ issue, ETH has discontinued C++ and gone with 'GO', ok, but here'e the real deal killer. ETHEREUM say's 'cryptography by obscurity', thus they don't document anything and deny everything and nobody knows what's going on, now some people would call this 'incompetence' in another lifetime ( I was writing c++ compilers in early 1980's ) The problem with both BTC & ETH is the hype because of the wealth 'effect' makes everyone blind to the problems, ... which just means one thing to an 'old timer' this is great time for other's to jump ahead and resolve the problems. Here's another deal about ETH, BUTERIN at 14 won a coding COMP, hell were we all not child prodigy's?? Then at 19 he wrote the BITCOIN python library, and then didn't fit into core so went on to 'make' ethereum, ... IMHO BUTERIN has no base, and is largely self taught, so who cares what he thinks or does ( topic of this article ) But to the real issue is that ETH has TERRIBLE problems, and the biggest problem is that the CORE (BUTERIN) doesn't trust and hates its users ( the 'obscurity is safety principal' ) again, the idea is if they don't tell the truth no bad people can harm them, but the problem of course is because they don't tell the truth they surround themselves with liars, "YES MEN". ETH is a basked case of problems, and of course BTC is not far behind, BITCOIN 2.0 will jump to 3.0 and leave all this crap behind, Jump forward men, all you fear to lose is your chains.