Block chain size

Hey guys,

Hope you don’t mind moving this question from newbie intro forum to here, seems more appropriate.
One of the posters told me that: “The block chain is a ledger of ALL transactions that occurred on the network since the beginning of the coin. These transactions are grouped together and stored in blocks. So yes, this will grow exponentially.”

Is it going to be sustainable? Blockchains are big already and coins aren’t even close to getting to wide adoption. How will everyone store all transactions that have ever occurred in the world since beginning of time? No hard drive will hold that so it would have to be somehow distributed among all the member of the network. But in that case won’t transaction verifications take forever since nobody has complete block chain?

bump?

zerodrama

there’s chainless clients for bitcoin and we may have a solution as well

That works, but still, someone has to have it. By the time blockchains outgrow any consumer grade connected device i.e. PC or a phone, who is going to be responsible for storing it?

In essence these entities will be “banks” or keepers of the chain, if you will. Kind of what blockchain.info is doing? What’s the long term vision for who they are going to be, how many should there be and how is the community going to maintain trust in these services? After all, these ledgers will grow far bigger than say, any current bank’s records, because each bank deals only with it’s own transactions.

ghostlander

[quote]By the time blockchains outgrow any consumer grade connected device i.e. PC or a phone, who is going to be responsible for storing it?[/quote]

Storage space is not a problem for PC. Download time is more important as new users join every day. In addition, people don’t do block chain back-ups usually, so if a corruption happens due to software or hardware failure, they have to download everything since the genesis block again. There are transaction fees and off-chain payment processors to keep block chains sized reasonably.

[quote name=“ghostlander” post=“38373” timestamp=“1385911531”]
There are transaction fees and off-chain payment processors to keep block chains sized reasonably.
[/quote]

I understand that you don’t have to have the whole chain to perform a transaction with payment processors that you mention.

However, bitcoin block chain is now 15GB. If crypto takes off to the point that people buy clothes and groceries with it, as one of the responders mentioned it will grow exponentially, and before you know it, will be million times bigger. Once that happens, you will have to have these payment processors that store the blockchains in order for the system to continue functioning.
Once you can’t get away from the processors then the system will become centralized to some degree, no?

Kevlar

[quote name=“zb32” post=“38563” timestamp=“1385954082”]
[quote author=ghostlander link=topic=4968.msg38373#msg38373 date=1385911531]
There are transaction fees and off-chain payment processors to keep block chains sized reasonably.
[/quote]

I understand that you don’t have to have the whole chain to perform a transaction with payment processors that you mention.

However, bitcoin block chain is now 15GB. If crypto takes off to the point that people buy clothes and groceries with it, as one of the responders mentioned it will grow exponentially, and before you know it, will be million times bigger. Once that happens, you will have to have these payment processors that store the blockchains in order for the system to continue functioning.
Once you can’t get away from the processors then the system will become centralized to some degree, no?
[/quote]

Nope.

You don’t have to download the ANY of the blockchain in order to make a transaction.

You don’t have to store ANY of the blockchain to see a transaction get broadcast, or confirmed.

You don’t even have to have ANY of the blockchain EXCEPT for the latest block in order to mine.

The current paradigm is overly protective, but in the future, we will be able to relax some of the requirements on the client with regards to blockchain download and storage, and services will take the place of the entire chain, and you’ll be able to choose who you trust. This is true today, it’s just not being fully utilized. For example, why download the blockchain to see if your address has spendable inputs, when you can just query the blockchain.info API? Too trusting? You could query multiple services and ensure that they all agree. Since anyone can run such a service, it can’t ever be forcibly centralized.

I think we’re talking past each other. I got that, as a client and user of coins, I don’t have to have the blockchain.

What I’m trying to understand better is how things will look long term. Is it correct that once blockchain is big enough, then services like blockchain.info will be required for the ecosystem to properly work? Sure, there will be many of them, in different countries, but that’s what I meant by partially centralized. They would have to store a lot of data and take a lot of traffic.