I'm not sure what you mean by "assume storage space will expand exponentially", since there is only a limited number of potential active crypto-currency users, making a small number of daily transactions (ignoring things like High Frequency Trading), recorded in a blockchain that grows linearly over time.
Would you say that the credit card network, or PayPal, has exponentially increasing storage requirements? It's possible for Bitcoin (for example) to be decentralised and useful to the world and only require linearly increasing storage space.
Fortunately it seems that storage technology will continue to scale linearly over the coming years too:
I should've phrased that better. What I meant was to assume consumer affordable storage space will increase in size exponentially i.e. if we pay $0.01 / GB today, we should be paying fractions of that fraction in a year (because obviously "exponential" is loose term here).
> (ignoring things like High Frequency Trading)
HFT is not a blockchain transaction. They are off blockchain transactions entirely because they trade money between bitcoin / other cryptos and dollars.
> there is only a limited number of potential active crypto-currency users
My entire point is that this limits them from growing. If the blockchain is kept from exploding, it helps to onboard more users.
> Would you say that the credit card network, or PayPal, has exponentially increasing storage requirements?
Indeed not. But their user base is now standardised. So they have a predictable number of transactions every second. However, their storage requirements are still obviously industrial grade server farms. The point of bitcoin is that everyone should have a copy of every transaction (excluding lightning network transactions). You see the connection? Not all of us can have our own server farms. If we all wants to store every transaction in the way the parent of my previous comment alluded to (increase block size), each of us will need our own mini server farm i.e. exponential storage growth.
> It's possible for Bitcoin (for example) to be decentralised and useful to the world and only require linearly increasing storage space.
Yes. It'll level off at some point. But we are far, faaar away from that point. So it'll take quite a while before it levels off.
> The point of bitcoin is that everyone should have a copy of every transaction (excluding lightning network transactions).
Is that the point of bitcoin? Satoshi said:
> Long before the network gets anywhere near as large as that, it would be safe for users to use Simplified Payment Verification (section 8) to check for double spending, which only requires having the chain of block headers, or about 12KB per day. Only people trying to create new coins would need to run network nodes.
(He also didn't say anything about "lightning network transactions".)
> If we all wants to store every transaction in the way the parent of my previous comment alluded to (increase block size), each of us will need our own mini server farm i.e. exponential storage growth.
The BTC blockchain is currently 250 GB. If blocks had been 10 times bigger, the blockchain would still be less than 3 TB, and blocks would almost never be full, which would reduce transaction fees and help to onboard more users. I don't think that storing 3 TB of data requires a server farm.
> (He also didn't say anything about "lightning network transactions".)
Correct. I'm not going by what Satoshi said, but by what development the bitcoin core team is aiming to create now.
> If blocks had been 10 times bigger, the blockchain would still be less than 3 TB
Correct. The aim of the project is to keep it as small as possible. 3 TB may not seem prohibitive today, but that's because there's hardly been any usage of the network compared to what the real world looks like. If bitcoin truly competed with Visa / Mastercard, both of those numbers will start looking a lot bigger. If the compressed version was 3TB, the bigger blocks version now becomes 30TB - suddenly far out of consumer grade storage for a normal person.
So you admit that increasing the block size by 10x would solve the current congestion/fees problem without needing the complexity and changed incentive structure of the Lightning network, and that bitcoin doesn't compete with Visa/Mastercard yet so it doesn't need a 30 TB blockchain (which would fit on two hard drives, which many consumers have).
To give an analogy, it's like saying that there should be a law limiting people to only buying 5 books, because if there wasn't a limit then someone could buy a quadrillion books, which would require cutting down all the trees in the world. You're trying to prevent a problem that won't exist, by introducing a restriction that causes a very real problem instead.
> So you admit that increasing the block size by 10x would solve the current congestion/fees problem without needing the complexity and changed incentive structure of the Lightning network,
I don't think so. That also requires a faster cycling of transactions than the current 10 minute round. But yes, obv a larger number of transactions can fit into the block so throughput will increase.
> 30 TB blockchain (which would fit on two hard drives, which many consumers have)
1) I don't know if you understand who "consumers" are. 30 TB is far, faaaaaar away from what a normal consumer has. Most of us have a laptop at most and that limits us to 1 TB storage. I personally have a lot of cloud storage, but I'm not the average consumer. I'm highly tech savvy compared to the normal person. So go out and talk to people not in tech and see what their tech specs look like. If they can't match up to you, they still need to be able to process transactions.
2) I didn't say it doesn't need a 30TB blockchain. You're completely misunderstanding my point. I'm saying your glib observation of "oh it's 300GB now, it can scale up to 3TB if it's bigger" is highly ill informed. If you push it only 1 order of magnitude, you're going from 3TB to 30TB and it becomes untenable. Now instead if it was 10KB and scaled to 10MB, it obv makes no difference even with 3 orders of magnitude.
3) You're also not understanding the larger picture. If all transactions in history have to be stored in the blockchain, it requires scaling to become less than linear (or at max, linear) to keep up with consumer storage expectations. It doesn't matter what the size of the blockchain is now (as long as it's within say 1TB that the average consumer can access). It matters how big it gets when there are billions of transactions flowing through it every day. So by that account, even 250GB is a very big number because once we hit billions of transactions, unless the relationship is inverse exponential, we'll breach limits long before touching that point.
> You're trying to prevent a problem that won't exist
The problem that won't exist of billions of transactions passing through the blockchain? Possibly if we had off chain solutions, yes. Which we do in very early stages. If not, the problem is very very real.
>It doesn't matter what the size of the blockchain is now (as long as it's within say 1TB that the average consumer can access).
Why does it have to fit on a laptop? Only miners influence which tx get into a block, not people on laptops.
>The problem that won't exist of billions of transactions?
Visa does 1 trillion tx/yr.
Bitcoin tx is ~500 bytes
That's just 500 TB/year. Miners with today's hardware can store that easily. A pruned observer node could run with just a few hundred dollars of hard drives even at Visa scale!
The bottom line is that Satoshi and others thought about this and no one saw it as a problem until Blockstream and other VC funded startups began pushing sidechains that they could profit from.
People here keep harkening back to "but miners can handle that shit easily". It is entirely to avoid the setup where miners are the sole arbiters of the chain, that we require this. The entire point of bitcoin is to put power into the hands of people. Which means everyone needs to keep a copy of the blockchain instead of having a small number of entities with massive storage fighting against each other to decide which chain is valid.
The very fact that you guys are not recognising this means that you still don't understand the concept of decentralisation and want to settle with the altcoin route of making up the word as you go along and if it fits your narrative. If your entire chain was at the mercy of a few large mining corporations, you are dead in the water. The attack vector is easily compromised and you have no leg to stand on.
> A pruned observer node could run with just a few hundred dollars of hard drives even at Visa scale!
Each node would need to download 1.4 TB of data per day (500TB / 365) to keep up, and the UTXO set would presumably expand dramatically with a volume increase of that magnitude, making it impracticable to store even a pruned state on a consumer hard drive.
Except SPV as Satoshi described doesn't work, so the trade-off becomes "can users simply trust miners" to which the answer from experience is a resounding "no".
For context, this is one of the main devs of the lightning network, who's furthering the propaganda that "miners cannot be trusted". Which is a pretty dumb thing to say, since it's the core security assumption for Bitcoin to work at all.
Would you say that the credit card network, or PayPal, has exponentially increasing storage requirements? It's possible for Bitcoin (for example) to be decentralised and useful to the world and only require linearly increasing storage space.
Fortunately it seems that storage technology will continue to scale linearly over the coming years too:
https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15064/seagate-roadmap.png