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I've always wondered how long until the blockchain would grow before it became unlikely new users/miners would want to hold a copy. At some point, it seems lik

by DougN7 12y ago

I've always wondered how long until the blockchain would grow before it became unlikely new users/miners would want to hold a copy. At some point, it seems like it would grow faster than typical network download rates meaning a new miner, etc would never be able to get their initial copy.

desdiv 12y ago
You don't need the full blockchain to become a miner, you just need a database of all unspent transaction outputs. The last time I checked said database was only a couple hundred MB. As for people who do need the full blockchain in the future scenario you describe, they could always pay someone to sneakernet it to them.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  > As for people who do need the full blockchain in the future scenario you describe, they could always pay someone to sneakernet it to them. I just imagined an armed convoy protecting a truck loaded with hard drives.
  - vanattab 12y ago
    I just imagined and army of Converse wearing hipsters loaded with hard drives.
    - sp332 12y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=jrHXu7M-U68#t=85 https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=jr...
  - uptown 12y ago
    Which would make no sense. The whole idea of a distributed ledger is that there's not one authoritative copy. Stealing those drives would yield nothing because it wouldn't correlate to the rest of the copies in existence.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - gwern 12y ago
    Imagine instead one armed courier with a briefcase containing a key, and a bunch of hard drives with signed files mailed via USPS. :)
sickpig 12y ago
Users could use SPV clients in case of resource constraints, on the other hand there are incentives in place, that till now, have kept miners from shutting down their nodes. Bitcoin core latest version (0.10.0) have reduced significantly the bootstrap time of a node (e.g. through "header-first" mechanism). Future releases will introduce other improvements that will lead to a reduction in terms of network bandwidth/latency (O(1) block propagation, IBLT) and IO space (e.g. pruning) That said it's true there's no economic incentives in place to "just" run a full node. Person that run full nodes does that for a lot of reasons modulo the economic one. Hence the number of full nodes is steadily declining http://www.bitcoinpulse.com/#/chart/bitnodes/num_nodes http://www.bitcoinpulse.com/#/chart/bitnodes/num_nodes There are proposals (1) floating around to fix the situation through, guess what... economic incentives, but we are for from getting some sort of agreement, worse than that I dare say that in this case we're still struggling with problem awareness. (1) https://bitcoinism.liberty.me/2015/02/09/economic-fallacies-and-the-block-size-limit-part-2-price-discovery/ https://bitcoinism.liberty.me/2015/02/09/economic-fallacies-...

by DougN7 12y ago

desdiv 12y ago

You don't need the full blockchain to become a miner, you just need a database of all unspent transaction outputs. The last time I checked said database was only a couple hundred MB. As for people who do need the full blockchain in the future scenario you describe, they could always pay someone to sneakernet it to them.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
> As for people who do need the full blockchain in the future scenario you describe, they could always pay someone to sneakernet it to them. I just imagined an armed convoy protecting a truck loaded with hard drives.
- vanattab 12y ago
  I just imagined and army of Converse wearing hipsters loaded with hard drives.
  - sp332 12y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=jrHXu7M-U68#t=85 https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=jr...
- uptown 12y ago
  Which would make no sense. The whole idea of a distributed ledger is that there's not one authoritative copy. Stealing those drives would yield nothing because it wouldn't correlate to the rest of the copies in existence.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- gwern 12y ago
  Imagine instead one armed courier with a briefcase containing a key, and a bunch of hard drives with signed files mailed via USPS. :)

sickpig 12y ago

Users could use SPV clients in case of resource constraints, on the other hand there are incentives in place, that till now, have kept miners from shutting down their nodes. Bitcoin core latest version (0.10.0) have reduced significantly the bootstrap time of a node (e.g. through "header-first" mechanism). Future releases will introduce other improvements that will lead to a reduction in terms of network bandwidth/latency (O(1) block propagation, IBLT) and IO space (e.g. pruning) That said it's true there's no economic incentives in place to "just" run a full node. Person that run full nodes does that for a lot of reasons modulo the economic one. Hence the number of full nodes is steadily declining http://www.bitcoinpulse.com/#/chart/bitnodes/num_nodes http://www.bitcoinpulse.com/#/chart/bitnodes/num_nodes There are proposals (1) floating around to fix the situation through, guess what... economic incentives, but we are for from getting some sort of agreement, worse than that I dare say that in this case we're still struggling with problem awareness. (1) https://bitcoinism.liberty.me/2015/02/09/economic-fallacies-and-the-block-size-limit-part-2-price-discovery/ https://bitcoinism.liberty.me/2015/02/09/economic-fallacies-...