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Would you still run a Full Bitcoin Node, if the storage and bandwidth increases as many users start to use Ordinals to Store JPEG's
If that happens, would you switch to an SPV wallet
https://zerosync.org/ is coming But still will be needed full bitcoin nodes.
First, Bitcoin blockchain growth is limited, ability for Inscriptions (not Ordinals, Ordiansl is interpretation of blockchain, doesn't add data itself) to make it grow faster is limited. And these amounts aren't big for me, for using at home.
Second, you can run pruned node, where you don't keep whole blockchain history after validation. That's what I do on, for example, my laptop or when I have VPS with limited resources. Just checked, with prune=5000 (5 GB), total bitcoin datadir size for me is 13 GB. And it will not increase much with blockchain growth.
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A used 1TB HDD is $15 USD and falling.
At current block height, 815727, it takes approx 500 GB to store the chain.
If every block was 4MB from now on, it would take 125,000 blocks to fill the remaining space on the 1TB drive.
More likely, blocks will average 2MB so 250,000 blocks should still be able to fit on the 1TB drive.
So it will take about 2.5 - 5 years to fill a 1TB drive.
By then, a 2TB HDD might cost $15.
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Why would one buy used HDD nowadays? It's like buying used GPU that has been used for shitcoin mining before.
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Because the blocks and chainstate can be re-downloaded/indexed if there is a disk failure. Also, you can run multiple HDDs in a RAID to add redundancy. Blockchain is a great use for old drives. Writing to drives causes more wear than reading. With blockchain data, you're mostly reading and only writing the new blocks. So it generally is easy on a HDD, compared to running an OS which is always writing and rewriting data.
Maybe don't store your keys, or LN node data on a used HDD tho.
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Why use HDD at all? SSDs nowadays are cheap, faster and more reliable.
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1TB HDD is minimum requirement to run a node. SSD is superior. But SSD is more expensive.
For the price of a 1TB SSD, you could buy 4x used 1TB HDDs and run a RAID 10 on them. Then, you'd have 2TB of usable space. One drive can fail and you still have data integrity. And the speed is doubled. So if each HDD does 100MB/s, your RAID 10 does, 200MB/s. Which is about the same speed as a bottom-tier SSD.
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No, it's not the same speed, ATA SSD goes above 500 MB/s and NVMe goes even faster.
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You're right about that but for keeping the full blockchain the read/write speed of HDDs is fully sufficient.
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Yes, it kinda is, have done that in the past, but decided to move over to SSD only after cat at home made physicial attack on Bitcoin by accidentally trying to destroy it. :) Two SSDs in a mirror seems the best solution to me (I also run Lightning node there).
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Bandwidth shouldn't be too bad since we're at 4MB of data transmission max.
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Exactly. The other thing is these dumb uses of blockspace will either either get priced out more more efficient.
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What about the increasing number of Ordinals minted to Spam the blockchain with JPEG's.
would that cause a lot of junk in the blockchain?
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Yes, that could cause blocks to reach the max size of 4MBs per block, but still we should be okay.
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There is a project on GitHub that excludes ordinals from being added to your node. It doesn't lead to a hard fork.
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You mean patch by luke-jr? It only rejects them from the mempool, but you still store them after they are included in the blocks.
P.S. Inscriptions, not Ordinals. Ordinals are interpreation of relation between transaction inputs and outputs. Stuff that takes actual blockspace is Inscriptions.
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It must have been that. Thanks for the correction. I saw it during the first bout of the Ordinals mania, before I was running a node, so my memory was vague.
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It can’t be more than 4MB per block.
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as long as the big blockers don't come back to ruin the base layer, I'm not worried about future on-chain growth or the bandwidth required to sync blocks.
it's only when people who don't understand the physics of computer networks try to suggest idiotic things like "giga-meg blocks" that this becomes an issue.
4MB/block per 10 minutes is just 24MB/hour. My personal storage and home network speed have vastly outpaced that for the last 20 years. I just bought a microSD card with 1TB on it!
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As far as Bitcoin Core keeps its ethos so that anyone can host their own node, I don't think this is a real issue. We would have to fight another block war and lose it.
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I'd like to think that I would.
I think SSD storage will outperform block space. I think its currently around 600GB with the common SSD being 1TB. When the block chain reaches 2TB the common SSD should be around 8 or 16TB.
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Do we ever get to a point where that relationship breaks though?
Is the size increase linear (I guess it must be more or less?), so 15 years = 600GB -> 30 years 1.2TB -> 90 years 3.6TB. Could be wildly off but that back of a napkin assessment says we are okay.
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Maybe, but it's a long way off.
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