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Comment by imaginenore | Hacker News Reader

> So what he's saying is that the bitcoin network can not handle the typical volume of transactions? So you have to prioritize things?

No, it has to do with fighting spam and DoS attacks.

If there's no lower bound for the fee, and there's no prioritization, there's nothing stopping anybody from sending trillions of transactions to trillions of addresses non-stop.

> the block chain is HUGE

No, it's not. It's 20GB. Many modern games are larger than that.

A 4TB hard drive can be bought for $120. 20GB of that represents the total cost of $0.60. Oh noes!

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20GB still isn't something to scoff at if it wants wide-spread adoption. It's huge when you consider that anybody who wants to attempt to run Bitcoin has to download all 20GB just to get things installed. I have approximately a 1.5MB download speed. The space on my HD I can live without, but I gave-up trying to get the bitcoin-qt program to sync after about a week (I ran it mostly non-stop - I obviously wasn't getting anywhere near 1.5MB down, syncing the block-chain is slow) and just bought the little bitcoin I wanted straight into an exchange and then bought the other coins I was planning to buy anyway so I didn't have to mess with bitcoin myself.

The fact is, in it's current state the huge block-chain makes bitcoin anything but user-friendly.

You don't have to download the whole block-chain to use bitcoin.

While true, I don't believe many clients make it easy to do that still.

Nearly every mobile client does not download the blockchain and instead uses SPV (Simple Payment Verification / headers only mode) or relies on a trusted server for block information.

Electrum and MultiBit on the desktop are SPV clients.

Ah I didn't know about them. I'll have to check them out, I've had annoyances in the past because i never leave bitcoin-qt open to keep it in sync.

This.

Download a lightweight wallet that support SPV such Multibit. That doesn't download the full block chain.

If you don't want to wait a week or more to download the blockchain within the bitcoin program, there is a torrent to bootstrap the blockchain for new installations, last updated in April:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145386.0

That will get you up to April, then bitcoin the software will sync the remaining blocks up to the latest.

A) You don't need the whole blockchain on your regular PC.

B) If you're talking about running a node, even my shitty cheap VPN has a gigabit connection. It would take only (20GB/1 Gbit/s) = 2 minutes 20 seconds to download it.

Most modern games are not transferred over networks on a regular basis. The block chain is transferred over the network just about every time someone installs. Even using one of the torrents (which are way faster than syncing via the bitcoin client), this has to be done overnight on my home cable internet. If you're in a third world country, the time involved becomes completely prohibitive.

Bitcoin adoption involves syncing with the block chain, so this prevents adoption. So you absolutely should be concerned about a 20GB block chain.

EDIT: Also, phones. My smart phone doesn't have 20GB if storage, and even if yours does, I doubt you can sync 20GB over 3G/4G. A lot of people are touting Bitcoin as a point of sale payment system, but not being able to run it on your phone hurts that.

> Most modern games are not transferred over networks on a regular basis. The block chain is transferred over the network just about every time someone installs.

Like steam.

> Even using one of the torrents (which are way faster than syncing via the bitcoin client), this has to be done overnight on my home cable internet. If you're in a third world country, the time involved becomes completely prohibitive.

Third-world or not, if you live in a place with unreliable or slow internet, it makes no sense to run a full bitcoin node. Just run an SPV client like electrum - it's what most users should be doing today anyway. That way you do not need to download the blockchain.

Same thing for phones - all the mobile wallets I know of are SPV, and only use a few MB of storage.

Some systems like laptops come with SSD drives only. They're typically around 256gb at the moment. 20gb is a lot of space, unless you're also lugging around an external drive.

Running a full node on your laptop helps no one. They need to be permanently connected. Otherwise you should just run an SPV client.

There's good reason to run a fully validating client. SPV clients have quite a nice usability but really fall down in the security and privacy departments. As it currently stands people using Multibit have next to no privacy for a variety of reasons. Bitcoin Core is the most secure of wallets for a number of reasons, and possibly the most private when used correctly.

There are SPV clients with HD wallets so that's not a problem inherent to all of them.

What do you mean by next to no privacy? Doesn't Multibit use bloom filters to get the relevant tx data? Is there any SPV client that does not use bloom filters to ask for tx data?

What makes SPV clients have less privacy than full nodes?

SPV clients download less data than full nodes do, by definition, therefore they must always have less privacy from remote peers. Additionally the only widely used SPV clients today (bitcoinj based wallets) set very tight Bloom filters and don't really use them for privacy purposes, for various reasons. Plus they aren't HD so reuse addresses quite often.

In git master bitcoinj is now HD and so SPV HD wallets will start appearing in the near future. Garbling Bloom filters more aggressively is tricky and will take someone doing some serious work and R&D to really nail.

Why would you need to have the whole blockchain on your laptop? There are tons of lightweight wallets and online wallets.

> It's 20GB. Many modern games are larger than that.

It's large enough that it can't be stored in a single file on many good filesystems without extra fiddling. While "huge" is obviously a subjective measure, this would certainly seem to apply.

Either way, many modern games come in well under 20GB, so I'm not sure that's the best criterion to use. And storage isn't the problem, as much as the bandwidth requirements to bootstrap a bitcoin client.

And all of these problems will only grow larger over time.

What good filesystem can't support > 4GB files?

FAT32, the only file system which can be read and written from OS X, Windows and Linux without third party software and warnings you'll lose all your data.

The reference client does not store the blockchain as a giant file and instead splits the data into 128MB chunks on disk.

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