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by tromp 2250 days ago
One of the main goals of bitcoin was to be decentralized by allowing most computers to download and verify the entire history of bitcoin transactions within reasonable space and time. With a 32MB limit, that would amount to many TB of data rather than the current 250GB, and many weeks of verification instead of a few days.
2 comments
fidelramos 2250 days ago
Decentralization doesn't mean that everybody has to run their own node, but rather that anybody can do it without asking for permission from a central authority. It was always the plan that as the network grew the cost of running a node would increase, and they would be run in server farms. In the words of Satoshi Nakamoto [1]:

> The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms. The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don't generate.

Keeping the block size down just to allow underpowered nodes in the network has the negative effect of hampering scalability, increasing transaction fees and keeping BTC from following its intended design as P2P electronic cash.

Note that the size of the blockchain is not an issue for users, who can rely on SPV protocol to verify transactions without having to download the full blockchain nor having to blindly trust a third-party. SPV is secure as long as the blockchain is secure (i.e. there are no 51% attacks).

Also I want to mention that in Bitcoin full nodes described the miners, i.e. nodes that generate blocks. Validating blocks without mining serves no purpose in the Bitcoin whitepaper.

[1] https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/287/

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Retric 2250 days ago
Downloading years old data is pointless. Add a hash of all the existing public keys with balances (aka the ledger) every week and you can get away with just downloading 2 weeks of data + that leaguer. For people that want to data mine it, a measly 8TB dataset is tiny co pared to plenty of public datasets are hundreds of times that size. https://nasa.github.io/data-nasa-gov-frontpage/
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