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Yes I remember when you could send Bitcoins and your transaction was practically guaranteed to get into the next block. I had fun solving puzzles created using

Yes I remember when you could send Bitcoins and your transaction was practically guaranteed to get into the next block. I had fun solving puzzles created using Bitcoin scripts. If you could solve the puzzle you could win some Bitcoins. Transaction fees were so low as to be irrelevant and you could send small tips to anyone you wanted, buy beers, gift it to strangers to try out... But even then you could see that Bitcoin wouldn't scale. Most people couldn't run full nodes, block sizes were getting bigger and bigger. Bitcoin worked great when you had a few hundred thousand people using it but with 10s of millions it doesn't work well.

vbezhenar 6y ago
> Most people couldn't run full nodes Can you elaborate on that? I checked few years ago and it was possible to run full node. What would prevent me from running full node right now?
- barbegal 6y ago
  Maybe I should say didn't rather than couldn't. Everyone can rent a server for a few dollars a month to run a node. Most people home laptops are not suited to running a full node as they either have to be always on or are spending a lot of time validating blocks every time you power them on to catch up.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    That's a fundamental problem with any decentralized system no matter what source of consensus you use. Blockchains retain their history forever, it's only natural that it's going to use an excessive amount of storage.
tromp 6y ago
Running a fully verifying node doesn't require that much space, since you can prune away older blocks once verified (if you're fine with not being able to seed other nodes). It does take a fair amount of time to download so many GB of history.
- CyberDildonics 6y ago
  This is not true in any sense. After 11 years of use, a $10 vps can download the entire chain in under an hour and a half. A fast cable modem connection can do it in under three hours. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is 231 GB, the bitcoin chain is 381 GB. Call of Duty + Red Dead Redemption 2 = bitcoin's entire chain. This is about $6 USD of hard drive space. The throughput of bitcoin is about 1.5 -kilobytes- per second. At that speed reddit.com would take 36 minutes to load.
  - tromp 6y ago
    You need to verify the history as well and continually update the UTXO set. That takes a lot more time, especially with a spinning hard disk, since the UTXO updates are not particularly sequential.
    - CyberDildonics 6y ago
      First, that isn't what you actually said. Also no it doesn't. It takes a fraction of a second on a single core for each block. It's 900KB for a full block. The only reason it would take a long time is a particular client using CPUs extremely inefficiently and leaving them idle most of the time.
3np 6y ago
A $30 SBC such as RPi 3 with a $50 SSD is more than enough to run a full Bitcoin node with full history. You can share with a blockchain explorer or Lightning node without performance being a problem. Many people with little technical knowledge do this. Even a leftover smartphone from yesteryear should be capable of running a full node, as long as you scale storage appropriately. I synced a full BTC node from scratch on budget hardware last week, took about 2 days total. Meanwhile, a full tracing archive ETH node took >4 months on a dedicated 8c16t CPU, 64GiB DDR4 RAM and tiered NVMe + SATA SSD for the 8TiB.

vbezhenar 6y ago

> Most people couldn't run full nodes Can you elaborate on that? I checked few years ago and it was possible to run full node. What would prevent me from running full node right now?

barbegal 6y ago
Maybe I should say didn't rather than couldn't. Everyone can rent a server for a few dollars a month to run a node. Most people home laptops are not suited to running a full node as they either have to be always on or are spending a lot of time validating blocks every time you power them on to catch up.
- imtringued 6y ago
  That's a fundamental problem with any decentralized system no matter what source of consensus you use. Blockchains retain their history forever, it's only natural that it's going to use an excessive amount of storage.

tromp 6y ago

Running a fully verifying node doesn't require that much space, since you can prune away older blocks once verified (if you're fine with not being able to seed other nodes). It does take a fair amount of time to download so many GB of history.

CyberDildonics 6y ago
This is not true in any sense. After 11 years of use, a $10 vps can download the entire chain in under an hour and a half. A fast cable modem connection can do it in under three hours. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is 231 GB, the bitcoin chain is 381 GB. Call of Duty + Red Dead Redemption 2 = bitcoin's entire chain. This is about $6 USD of hard drive space. The throughput of bitcoin is about 1.5 -kilobytes- per second. At that speed reddit.com would take 36 minutes to load.
- tromp 6y ago
  You need to verify the history as well and continually update the UTXO set. That takes a lot more time, especially with a spinning hard disk, since the UTXO updates are not particularly sequential.
  - CyberDildonics 6y ago
    First, that isn't what you actually said. Also no it doesn't. It takes a fraction of a second on a single core for each block. It's 900KB for a full block. The only reason it would take a long time is a particular client using CPUs extremely inefficiently and leaving them idle most of the time.

3np 6y ago

A $30 SBC such as RPi 3 with a $50 SSD is more than enough to run a full Bitcoin node with full history. You can share with a blockchain explorer or Lightning node without performance being a problem. Many people with little technical knowledge do this. Even a leftover smartphone from yesteryear should be capable of running a full node, as long as you scale storage appropriately. I synced a full BTC node from scratch on budget hardware last week, took about 2 days total. Meanwhile, a full tracing archive ETH node took >4 months on a dedicated 8c16t CPU, 64GiB DDR4 RAM and tiered NVMe + SATA SSD for the 8TiB.