Bitcoin block size debate exposing problem with requiring too much consensus

[Doomedj2008]

I think I made two pretty good posts in the past as to why increasing the blockchain size is a problem:

@Doomedj2008

An increased blockchain size is not sustainable… 20MB blocks * (24 hours in a day * 60 minutes in an hour / 10 minutes) = 2.8 GB a day.

@Doomedj2008

I just wanted to put this into perspective here of how devistating the increased blockchain size would be… I only had to time to type up that little blurb up there before I had to leave this morning. With a blockchain transaction limit of 20MB blocks every 10 minutes… 2.8GB a day. If the blockchain actually increased by this much every day, within a year the blockchain would be almost 1 TB in size!

2.8 GB a day * 365 days in a year = 1022 GB

With a blockchain that big… I couldn’t even run the bitcoin core on my computer even if I wanted to! My hard drive only has 300GB of storage… and even less on my laptop (with an SSD). If the blockchain didn’t reach this size in 1 year, what about in 2 years? or 5?

This is one thing that sets Maidsafe apart from bitcoin. With Maidsafe, everyone can contribute. Not just people with 20-30 GB of storage space. The thing I realized after being around bitcoin for a few years is… bitcoin is filled with arbitrary code. Bitcoin tends to create it’s own problems. Why wait 10 minutes for a block of transactions? Why set a block size limit of 1MB? Why the transaction fees??? Now I know there are reasons behind each of those, but we have the ability to build a system that is not unreasonable, or based on an individual’s wishes. When Maidsafe comes out, it will prove what decentralized technology really can do!

The biggest problem with increasing the blockchain size is that it further decreases the amount of people that can actually run a full node, and if less and less people can fun a full node, bitcoin no longer becomes decentralized, because it will only be a few people with very large servers who can run bitcoin. Don’t believe me? Check out this chart showing the number of full bitcoin nodes over the past year. The number of full nodes has decreased from 7500 to only 6000 nodes. There is even an incentive program running to help get people running a full bitcoin node! But sadly, even this hasn’t made the number of full nodes increase. I even set up a bitcoin full node on my computer, and it took a full 24 hours to download (and process)… last I checked the blockchain size was 40 GiB, that’s a lot to download.

tl;dr: The blockchain size will increase to over 1TB if they increase the transaction limit; yes, decentralized applications are hard to update; the number of full bitcoin nodes are decreasing.