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> “Just make the blocks bigger” means more and more storage of a permanent ledger, which means less and less people can run a node." This argument was already
by suikadayo 6y ago
> “Just make the blocks bigger” means more and more storage of a permanent ledger, which means less and less people can run a node."
This argument was already debunked by the Bitcoin community from the beginning before the hard fork even happened though - Moore's Law. Disk space rises and price goes down as time goes by - it really wasn't ever an issue. Even 2mb, 4mb would've been enough for the next few years.
- tracedddd 6y agoWe’re outpacing Moore’s law 2mb or 4mb would have helped, yes. I don’t think it would have been too big of a problem, but I don’t think it would help much either. We’d just be back against the limit. If we want to really succeed we need innovation.
- CyberDildonics 6y agoThe innovation already happened. There is no technical reason why multiple orders of magnitude more transactions couldn't be on the bitcoin chain if it wasn't intentionally crippled. If your internet connection had the throughput of bitcoin it would take you 36 minutes to load reddit.com Anyone can rent a VPS for $10 USD that can download the entire chain in under an hour and a half. There are 14TB single hard drives out now, which would be able to store the bitcoin chain for the next 300 years. One hard drive, 300 years. The only part that doesn't work is the $31.50 average transaction fee.
- suikadayo 6y agoWow, I just checked - you weren’t kidding. 14TB for ~300 USD. Any person living in a third world country and bought BTC 2 years ago would be able to afford that - decentralization isn’t an issue. But yeah, this just further proves what a weak argument it was for BTC to go with small blocks.
- Kathula 6y agoIf the blocks just keep increasing in size to accommodate small fees then there won't by any (or just a tiny) reward for miners once the block-reward runs out. This will make the hashrate go down significantly and make Bitcoin as a blockchain very unsecure and vurnable.
- imtringued 6y agoThere was a site that ran the calculations. Assuming terabyte sized blocks you would be able to fund multiple $20 million dollar data centers per year. By fund I mean build new ones.