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So i have a pretty clear view of how bitcoin operates, but what i don't understand about ETH is the description of it being a generalized protocol, or a "world

So i have a pretty clear view of how bitcoin operates, but what i don't understand about ETH is the description of it being a generalized protocol, or a "world computer". They talk about dns or messenger accounts, etc, but is all this data stored on the blockchain? How does the size not balloon out of control?

rawtxapp 6y ago
> How does the size not balloon out of control? It does, which is why they are looking into scaling solutions (sharding, layer 2 solutions, etc).
Geee 6y ago
It does balloon and has already ballooned. There's company called Infura that hosts most of Ethereum full nodes. Because of this, the system is quite fragile and not properly decentralized. https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/84232/ethereum-infrastructure-provider-infura-is-down https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/84232/ethereum-infrastru...
- DennisP 6y ago
  The current size for an Ethereum full node is 690 GB on Geth, or 394 GB on OpenEthereum. https://etherscan.io/chartsync/chaindefault https://etherscan.io/chartsync/chaindefault You can buy a 1 TB SSD for about a hundred bucks. There are various reasons people use Infura, but inability to run a full node locally is not one of them. (The devs are working on removing some of the reasons for using Infura, by improving light clients.) Now if you want an archive node, that will use a lot more space. But a full node already has the entire transaction history and entire current state. An archive node adds the ability to do fast queries of historical states, like "how much of this token did that address own in block number X last year." If you have a full node, then you can generate an archive node from local data, but if you don't need fast historical queries there's no need for it.
  - dmitriid 6y ago
    > The current size for an Ethereum full node is 690 GB on Geth, or 394 GB on OpenEthereum. > You can buy a 1 TB SSD for about a hundred bucks. And Ethereum is supposedly doing just over a million transactions a day [1] And it already requires a terabyte of data to support it. That's 1% of Alipay [2] That's 0.02% or thereabouts of Visa [3] How... How many terabytes will it need for those kinds of volumes? [1] https://etherscan.io/chart/tx https://etherscan.io/chart/tx [2] https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods/alipay https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods/alipay [3] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visanet-technology/aboutvisafactsheet.pdf https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visan...
    - DennisP 6y ago
      Rollups compress the data on chain, and sharding will mean individual nodes don't have to store all the data. https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html There's also work on things like clearing data that hasn't been accessed for a long time, and allowing it to be restored by supplying a Merkle branch.
MatthewRayfield 6y ago
from what i've seen anything heavier than a URL is NOT stored directly in the blockchain. And even URLs are done sparingly and/or dynamically. for example NFT metadata/data is often stored in IPFS & only linked to from the contract. but confusingly some people still call data stored on IPFS "on-chain data".
casi 6y ago
Full nodes are around 500GB, so they do fill up faster than bitcoin does. Archive nodes are bigger, but you can get everything in an archive node from a full node as it contains all the proofs. There are other data pruning techniques, and lots of work being done on light clients for eth2 (so you could connect via a light client running inside an app on your phone, rather than the app connecting to infura/alchemy). Though contrary to what people think about this being a weakness for ethereum, there are still ~10000 nodes running, so pretty close to the amount bitcoin has. Its an area under active research though.
krrrh 6y ago
The world computer idea does help to understand it. If you are playing a game or running some other processes on your discrete computer sometimes you accidentally pin the CPU, RAM, and IO, then you’ll run into issues where copying files to a USB disk or even doing simple things like editing cells in Excel becomes next to impossible until you force quit some applications. In the “world computer” known as Ethereum, operations are prioritized via “gas” payments in ETH. A bunch of people you don’t know on the other side of the world might get interested in trading drawings of cats with each other[1], and suddenly the “world computer” has no resources available, and the cost of inserting simple records into the “world database”, or moving some tokens to an exchange suddenly goes from $2 to $50, or $500. This can happen right in the middle of an operation so you have to be careful to consult “gas prices” and probably the I Ching wouldn’t hurt, and then kind of make a guess and hope your transaction doesn’t get stranded. If you have some tokens you want to get out of your wallet and you don’t have any ETH in the wallet to pay for the transaction you may need to beg, borrow, or steal some, and you’ll almost certainly be left with some dollars worth in your wallet that you may never be able to empty completely. Imagine what it would have been like to work on a big timeshare mainframe in the sixties where booking time to do simple things cost massive sums of money, except that the bids for resources can come in from all over the world and things are being repriced constantly. People like to call this decentralized, because no one is in control, but it actually centralizes the allocation of resources in a way that makes things many multiple times more expensive than they should be. [1] The “world computer” is not actually trading images, because that would be impossible given its limited compute resources, so all of the hard stuff like transmitting or decoding a gif is actually happening on the normal internet and discrete computers. The “world computer” is just spending tonnes of resources recording which user currently “owns” the cat via a database entry.
- casi 6y ago
  Just to expand on a few points: Transactions getting stuck because of gas prices spiking: This was one of the main drivers of the 1559 improvement proposal which was recently accepted for the summer upgrade. Hopefully it fixes the UX around transactions and estimating gas fees. On demand for blockspace: as the linked interview goes into, scalability has been the main point of research for the past 5 years and has come on remarkably, we should hopefully see improvements over the next few months and the rest of the year leading up to pos. On making things more expensive than they should be: the goal is always make it as cheap as possible whilst maintaining security. Now, you may not value that security of the ledger, but others do. It will be cheaper than it is use right now, but it will always cost more than mysql. Some people value that, others don't. I would argue the constant demand for blockspace (and so the high prices) show pretty clearly there is significant demand for that security. The decentralisation is about resilience of the system, security of the information, and transparency (but not surveillance). We cant fix money and centralised forces of money and power overnight (through id argue theres a decent number of ethereum devs working on projects around UBI etc) but we can try create systems that allow people to work together with infrastructure they know wont be pulled out from under them when they need it. There are payment networks for sex workers who get relentlessly hassled and accounts blocked by banks, there are ubi scripts that you can adapt for your own community, there are quadratic funding mechanisms that can help us fund public goods. Beyond the stigma of the hype-moon-kids hustling money and crypto-scammers that seems to get most of the media attention, there is good work being done to actually help people. CryptoKitties is silly, but it proved something. the nft hype is a bit silly now, but it is creating interesting royalty and distribution ideas that allow me to e.g. sell my music without needing a stripe account and a bank account either of which could decide they dont want we anymore and screw me over. That is valuable to me.

rawtxapp 6y ago

> How does the size not balloon out of control? It does, which is why they are looking into scaling solutions (sharding, layer 2 solutions, etc).

Geee 6y ago

It does balloon and has already ballooned. There's company called Infura that hosts most of Ethereum full nodes. Because of this, the system is quite fragile and not properly decentralized. https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/84232/ethereum-infrastructure-provider-infura-is-down https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/84232/ethereum-infrastru...

DennisP 6y ago
The current size for an Ethereum full node is 690 GB on Geth, or 394 GB on OpenEthereum. https://etherscan.io/chartsync/chaindefault https://etherscan.io/chartsync/chaindefault You can buy a 1 TB SSD for about a hundred bucks. There are various reasons people use Infura, but inability to run a full node locally is not one of them. (The devs are working on removing some of the reasons for using Infura, by improving light clients.) Now if you want an archive node, that will use a lot more space. But a full node already has the entire transaction history and entire current state. An archive node adds the ability to do fast queries of historical states, like "how much of this token did that address own in block number X last year." If you have a full node, then you can generate an archive node from local data, but if you don't need fast historical queries there's no need for it.
- dmitriid 6y ago
  > The current size for an Ethereum full node is 690 GB on Geth, or 394 GB on OpenEthereum. > You can buy a 1 TB SSD for about a hundred bucks. And Ethereum is supposedly doing just over a million transactions a day [1] And it already requires a terabyte of data to support it. That's 1% of Alipay [2] That's 0.02% or thereabouts of Visa [3] How... How many terabytes will it need for those kinds of volumes? [1] https://etherscan.io/chart/tx https://etherscan.io/chart/tx [2] https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods/alipay https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods/alipay [3] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visanet-technology/aboutvisafactsheet.pdf https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visan...
  - DennisP 6y ago
    Rollups compress the data on chain, and sharding will mean individual nodes don't have to store all the data. https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html There's also work on things like clearing data that hasn't been accessed for a long time, and allowing it to be restored by supplying a Merkle branch.

MatthewRayfield 6y ago

from what i've seen anything heavier than a URL is NOT stored directly in the blockchain. And even URLs are done sparingly and/or dynamically. for example NFT metadata/data is often stored in IPFS & only linked to from the contract. but confusingly some people still call data stored on IPFS "on-chain data".

casi 6y ago

Full nodes are around 500GB, so they do fill up faster than bitcoin does. Archive nodes are bigger, but you can get everything in an archive node from a full node as it contains all the proofs. There are other data pruning techniques, and lots of work being done on light clients for eth2 (so you could connect via a light client running inside an app on your phone, rather than the app connecting to infura/alchemy). Though contrary to what people think about this being a weakness for ethereum, there are still ~10000 nodes running, so pretty close to the amount bitcoin has. Its an area under active research though.

krrrh 6y ago

The world computer idea does help to understand it. If you are playing a game or running some other processes on your discrete computer sometimes you accidentally pin the CPU, RAM, and IO, then you’ll run into issues where copying files to a USB disk or even doing simple things like editing cells in Excel becomes next to impossible until you force quit some applications. In the “world computer” known as Ethereum, operations are prioritized via “gas” payments in ETH. A bunch of people you don’t know on the other side of the world might get interested in trading drawings of cats with each other[1], and suddenly the “world computer” has no resources available, and the cost of inserting simple records into the “world database”, or moving some tokens to an exchange suddenly goes from $2 to $50, or $500. This can happen right in the middle of an operation so you have to be careful to consult “gas prices” and probably the I Ching wouldn’t hurt, and then kind of make a guess and hope your transaction doesn’t get stranded. If you have some tokens you want to get out of your wallet and you don’t have any ETH in the wallet to pay for the transaction you may need to beg, borrow, or steal some, and you’ll almost certainly be left with some dollars worth in your wallet that you may never be able to empty completely. Imagine what it would have been like to work on a big timeshare mainframe in the sixties where booking time to do simple things cost massive sums of money, except that the bids for resources can come in from all over the world and things are being repriced constantly. People like to call this decentralized, because no one is in control, but it actually centralizes the allocation of resources in a way that makes things many multiple times more expensive than they should be. [1] The “world computer” is not actually trading images, because that would be impossible given its limited compute resources, so all of the hard stuff like transmitting or decoding a gif is actually happening on the normal internet and discrete computers. The “world computer” is just spending tonnes of resources recording which user currently “owns” the cat via a database entry.

casi 6y ago
Just to expand on a few points: Transactions getting stuck because of gas prices spiking: This was one of the main drivers of the 1559 improvement proposal which was recently accepted for the summer upgrade. Hopefully it fixes the UX around transactions and estimating gas fees. On demand for blockspace: as the linked interview goes into, scalability has been the main point of research for the past 5 years and has come on remarkably, we should hopefully see improvements over the next few months and the rest of the year leading up to pos. On making things more expensive than they should be: the goal is always make it as cheap as possible whilst maintaining security. Now, you may not value that security of the ledger, but others do. It will be cheaper than it is use right now, but it will always cost more than mysql. Some people value that, others don't. I would argue the constant demand for blockspace (and so the high prices) show pretty clearly there is significant demand for that security. The decentralisation is about resilience of the system, security of the information, and transparency (but not surveillance). We cant fix money and centralised forces of money and power overnight (through id argue theres a decent number of ethereum devs working on projects around UBI etc) but we can try create systems that allow people to work together with infrastructure they know wont be pulled out from under them when they need it. There are payment networks for sex workers who get relentlessly hassled and accounts blocked by banks, there are ubi scripts that you can adapt for your own community, there are quadratic funding mechanisms that can help us fund public goods. Beyond the stigma of the hype-moon-kids hustling money and crypto-scammers that seems to get most of the media attention, there is good work being done to actually help people. CryptoKitties is silly, but it proved something. the nft hype is a bit silly now, but it is creating interesting royalty and distribution ideas that allow me to e.g. sell my music without needing a stripe account and a bank account either of which could decide they dont want we anymore and screw me over. That is valuable to me.