what happens when blockchain grows too big?

[Erkan Yilmaz]

a buddy asked: "what happens when the blockchain has grown too big to be practical? (what happens when people start uploading videos to the network etc?)"

helpful @amphetamine contributed with:

RT @amphetamine borrow ethereum's strategy? ethereum is a crazy idea to use the block chain for financial cloud computing. they plan to distribute "light trees" which are very pruned merkle trees for verifying specific transactions with some security 

https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-White-Paper#merkle-trees

Other suggestions?

twister nick, @erkan_yilmaz

[Miguel Freitas]

On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 7:47 AM, Erkan Yilmaz <erk...@gmail.com> wrote:

a buddy asked: "what happens when the blockchain has grown too big to be practical? (what happens when people start uploading videos to the network etc?)"

Assuming you are talking about twister: user's messages/photos/videos are NOT stored in blockchain, just the usernames are.

 

helpful @amphetamine contributed with:

RT @amphetamine borrow ethereum's strategy? ethereum is a crazy idea to use the block chain for financial cloud computing. they plan to distribute "light trees" which are very pruned merkle trees for verifying specific transactions with some security 

https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-White-Paper#merkle-trees

I don't think usernames database will ever be impractical for typical desktop users, but yes, mobile users would benefit from some "light client" optimizations which includes merkle trees and distributing just the block chain hashes.

regards,

Miguel

[m...@jarradhope.com]

What would be the size of a user registration blockchain at 100 million users?

I'm unsure how big the data structure is but say 32 bytes per user 1e8 × 32 / 1024 / 1024  is like 3 gigs. Let's hope our mobile bandwidth gets far more permissive :)

[Erkan Yilmaz]

see also "Important idea: How-to reduce block chain size in future / old username clean up" for some discussion

https://github.com/miguelfreitas/twister-core/issues/90