Author: Jared Lee Richardson 2017-03-29 19:46:50
Published on: 2017-03-29T19:46:50+00:00
The impact of running Bitcoin in the background on affordable, non-dedicated home-hardware should be a top consideration when deciding what block size is acceptable. Disk space is believed to be the most significant problem today, with RAM being the second most significant problem, and finally bandwidth consumption as the third most important consideration. The author believes that v0.14 is already too expensive on all three fronts, and that block size increases shouldn't be considered at all until the requirements are reduced. Bandwidth costs are more than 2 orders of magnitude higher cost than every other cost for full listening nodes without historical checkpointing in some fashion. For a non-full listening node, measured usage over several days was around 70 GB/month, which is $6.3 per month EC2 or $5.6 proportional Comcast cost. Even if a desktop didn't have pruning turned on, a desktop in the $500 range typically comes with 1 or 2 TB of storage by default, and without segwit or a blocksize cap increase, 3 years from now the full history will only take up the 33% of the smaller, three year old, budget-range PC hard drive.Increasing the block size could make it too expensive for a home user to run a full node, and user-run full nodes are what provide the strongest defense against political maneuvering. Transaction fees for users would go up if node operational costs remain high, slowing adoption as various use cases become impractical. This could result in competitive growth against Bitcoin's crypto-currency market share. If transaction fees go up from space limitations and they go up even further in real-world terms from price increases, while node costs decline, eventually it will cost more to send a transaction than it does to run a node for a full month.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T22:49:09.461280+00:00