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It’s not a big surprise that microcomputers that were barely able of keeping up five years ago are pushing their limit.
it's a big surprise that the team of brilliant software engineers dedicating (a subset of) their careers to protecting the worlds most important financial technology from idiocy were dumb enough to let these perfectly functional microcomputers get swamped by memory constraints when they were working perfectly just a handful of years ago.
note that it's not the storage getting swamped, it's the ram.
Before segwit, people were expecting blocks to land at 1.7–2.3 MB with full segwit adoption. The average blocksize has been about 1.6 MB in the last year.
it's the footprint of the UTXO set, not the size of blocks, not the drive size.
fee rates facilitating the creation UTXOs with huge witness is the problem. you don't want to un-discount the witness, and you don't want to solve for contiguous data. what would you like to solve for?
Additionally, it is a fact that inscriptions and OP_RETURN outputs are cheaper to validate than payment transactions, and most of the additional UTXOs created are spendable no different from any other payment output.
why mention validation?
their spendability is exactly the issue. UTXOs in the memory are what's constraining the decentralization onto weaker machines. the dominant cost on constrained hardware is UTXO set, not validation.
put another way, which sufficiently powerful computer would you recommend for some poor user outside of the 1st world to save up for in order to run a node for their community with the preferred permissionless blockchain, hmm? certainly not a fairly common and inexpensive raspi4.
Spammers are only buying blockspace nobody else is demanding at minimal feerates.
... doesn’t give you the right to tell other people what they are allowed to do with the blockspace they buy.
they're "buying block space" at witness discount rates.
tell me again why the witness discount was necessary?
(for the record, I don't agree that they're buying block space. miners sell placement priority in their templates not block-space... they can't sell something they don't own)
isolate a gullible crowd
isolation... by whom exactly? certainly not the people calling these invested individuals "rednecks"?
I have no idea what the answer to this is, but how do the 2-5% of fees paid by "spam" compare to the extra costs from transmitting and storing all that data?
Obviously, you're right that people either think it's worth running a node or they don't, but if it's more costly to do so than it needs to be, fewer people will do it than otherwise would.
Watching Netflix in HD is about 3 GB/h. The spam is less than 100 MB per day. So, the bandwidth is as much as watching a few minutes of Netflix per day.
After downloading a block and processing it in memory, we only read the blockchain data when we serve blocks to peers or when we rescan. That means that you can store the ~12 GB UTXO set on SSD, while you write the blockchain data to a HDD without much performance impact. A 2 TB HDD from Seagate or Western Digital is $80 today and will be enough to store the blockchain for another ten years. Also, most uses of full nodes at home are served perfectly fine with a pruned node that takes less than 50 GB of disk storage. So, the cost is a couple cups of coffee per year: negligible. If you live somewhere where that’s a lot of money, the calculus doesn’t change much: you run a node because it solves a problem for you. Either it’s worth it or not.
Besides, I have no clue why people are running nodes on microcomputers like Raspberry Pis. An old laptop is way more performant, costs the same, will use hardly any more power, and even comes with a built-in uninterruptible power supply.
It seems to me that most people who are complaining about the cost to run nodes are not running into a problem they can’t solve, but parroting talking points.
Thanks
No, we don’t all agree on those.
Agreed
Agreed
Disagree with witness discount and Taproot being mistakes
It’s not an acute problem. It’s not a big surprise that microcomputers that were barely able of keeping up five years ago are pushing their limit.
Before segwit, people were expecting blocks to land at 1.7–2.3 MB with full segwit adoption. The average blocksize has been about 1.6 MB in the last year. That means that the blockchain grows merely about 80 GiB per year without the segwit blocksize increase it would have been 50 GiB. Still, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the blockchain is nearing 1 TB (= 0.909 TiB) when Bitcoin is now 17 years old.
Did these people assume that they’d only have to buy one device to last them for their lifetime? If they bought a 1 TB hard drive a year or two ago, and didn’t anticipate that it would be too small in a couple years, I cannot commend them for their basic arithmetic skills.
They pay the very high cost of purchasing blockspace, the same as everyone else does for their transaction data. People are running nodes for themselves. Either the cost is worth it, or its not. Just because you decide to run a node for yourself doesn’t give you the right to tell other people what they are allowed to do with the blockspace they buy.
The network is totally fine even with a minor portion of node runners misconfiguring their nodes to make them less useful peers.
This gets repeated over and over, but somehow nobody has any statistics or data to support that the spam had a significant impact on IBD. Facts are that fees for spam transactions are about 2–5% of all fees in the past weeks, while blockspace usage of spam has been 20–40%. Anti-spam pundits keep only showing the latter number, but the way I interpret these charts is:
Spammers are only buying blockspace nobody else is demanding at minimal feerates. The spam isn’t even trying to compete with payment transactions anymore, so how could it drive up the cost of payment transactions? If people want less spam, they should send more payment transactions. Additionally, it is a fact that inscriptions and OP_RETURN outputs are cheaper to validate than payment transactions, and most of the additional UTXOs created are spendable no different from any other payment output.
So what we are looking at is a movement fueled by resentment over a feerate spike two years ago and by people daring to do with their blockspace something that these purists don’t like. The movement is very effectively splitting the community because their arguments are technically untenable and emotionally loaded, which most other bitcoiners reject rightfully.
No, it’s not. It’s fake urgency over a nothing burger, deliberately fabricating and perpetuated by pushing people’s buttons.
It’s just a regular con: isolate a gullible crowd, create tension between the in-crowd and out-crowd, raise your profile and profit from the outrage.