Hi Danny, On Mon, Apr 17, 2017 at 3:11 AM, Danny Thorpe wrote: > > 1TB HDD is now available for under $40 USD. How is the 100GB storage > requirement preventing anyone from setting up full nodes?
Yeah, but that's because most people (well, using myself as the "target market" anyway) are upgrading to SSD's for the faster boot and response times. Modern consumer OS's run incredibly slow on non-ssd drives! And since the vast majority of consumer laptops sold today fall into the $400 to $700 range, a 200 - 500gb SSD is about the most storage upgrade people can afford. And so I think David's premise, that having to devote only 30GB to running a full node instead of 100, would remove a major obstacle that prevents many more people running full bitcoin nodes. My only suggestion is, does it scale? I mean, if the bitcoin network volume grows exponentially and in 2 years the blockchain is 500GB, can the "small node" be adjusted down from one fifth of the blockchain to just one-tenth, or one twentieth? Can different smalInesses interoperate? Can I choose to store a small node with 20 - 30% of the blockchain, while others chose to share just 5% or 10% of it? Can I run "less small" node today that's 50GB? Can the default install be a "small node" that requires about 30GB of storage (if that is indeed the sweet spot for enticing many more users to bringing nodes online), but allow the user at install time, to choose *how* small? To, say, drag a slider anywhere up and down the range from 10GB to 100GB? If not, then it will have to be revisited constantly as the blockchain grows, and disk storage prices drop. I suspect the blockchain will grow in size, at some point in the not too distant future, much faster than storage prices drop, so making small, smaller and smallest nodes that can be configured to store more or less of it will be necessary to motivate most users to run nodes at all. But when that happens, there is likely to be exponentially *more* people using bitcoin, too! So an exponentially growing number of users running (smaller and smaller) nodes would take up the slack. Then, the blockchain would begin to look a lot more like a bittorrent, right? ;-) but -- happily -- one that you never need to download fully. -dave _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
