8GB Blocks wont seem big in the future.

[rogerver]

I've been around tech long enough to know that what seems big, fast, and expensive today, becomes next years electronic scrap.
Today 8GB blocks seem huge and unmanageable, but that quickly will no longer be the case.
Just look at these super huge (physically and capacity), fast, and expensive 8MB (NOT GB!) memory modules that I started my career by selling.
Now these same modules are sold by the pound as recycling scrap.

https://twitter.com/rogerkver/status/750690874191851521

[iFixBTCmemoryIssues]

I've been around tech long enough to know that what seems big, fast, and expensive today, becomes next years electronic scrap.
Today 8GB blocks seem huge and unmanageable, but that quickly will no longer be the case.
Just look at these super huge (physically and capacity), fast, and expensive 8MB (NOT GB!) memory modules that I started my career by selling.
Now these same modules are sold by the pound as recycling scrap.

https://twitter.com/rogerkver/status/750690874191851521

Baby steps

[rizzlarolla]

"Today 8GB blocks seem huge and unmanageable, but that quickly will no longer be the case."

Did you mean 8GB blockchain?
8 GB blocks (quickly) do seem huge.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

I've been around a long time (First PC was an Apple ][+ in 1980) and have seen a lot of changes. I totally agree with 8gig not being an issue in the future. The only question is how far into the future. 5 years? 10 years? I remember going from no hard drives, to 30meg Apple Cider in like 1982. That size didn't go up for a long time. 30-40 meg drives were still common in the early 90's and most stuff still ran off of floppies on the PC side. Remember paying over 2 grand for my first 1.2gb HD then another 2 grand for 9 gig in a year it jumped that fast. Recently we seemed to get stuck at 4TB for quite awhile then in no time it went from 5 to 8TB. I expect to see that keep going for a little while then get stuck again for a year or so. Sooner or later something new will hit and it will jump 10 to 100 fold in no time. It's happened before it will happen again.

[btc]

how do you eat an elephant?

ABBC3_SPOILER_SHOW

one bite at a time

let's prove the hardware works first. besides...bandwidth is the issue, not mempools crashing servers

[rogerver]

"Today 8GB blocks seem huge and unmanageable, but that quickly will no longer be the case."

Did you mean 8GB blockchain?
8 GB blocks (quickly) do seem huge.

I meant 8GB blocks.
The block chain is already approaching 80GB, but an 8,000 GB hard drive today costs less than $200

8GB blocks today aren't manageable, but the 8MB memory module I used to sell seemed huge at the time as well.
Today, my company commonly sells 8GB memory modules, for a fraction of the price the 8MB one used to sell for.

Today I think 8MB blocks would be very manageable, and in the future 8GB blocks will be too.

[DOGed]

Those that support smaller blocks will say that Moore's law, which is essentially the basis for your claim that "8GB blocks will not seem big in the future" is dead, and to an extent they are right (but their conclusion is still incorrect).

Traditionally, it has been assumed (via Moore's law) that processing speeds (and similarly, network speeds, and the ability to fit information in RAM and storage) doubles every two years. More recently, this has been closer to every ~2.5 years, and could possibly slow over the very long term in the future.

I still think however that growth in technology will outpace growth in demand for block space.

I think it is probably reasonable to say that 8MB blocks are safe today.

So lets say for example that technology allows for the maximum block size to double every three years (to be very conservative). This would mean that 128MB blocks would be safe after 12 years and 1GB blocks would be safe after 21 years, and 8GB blocks after about 30 years.

[rogerver]

Just like the people claiming Bitcoin is a flash in the pan, people have been claiming Moore's law is coming to and end for decades now.
Both groups are always proven wrong in the longer term.

Regarding your numbers, you are assuming that 8MB is the maximum safe block size today.
I think a strong argument can be made that 20MB blocks are already safe today.
If we still take your ultra conservative estimate of 3 years for each doubling, 8GB blocks would be safe in closer to 25 years from now.

If we assume the doubling period is every two years, as Wikipedia states for Moore's Law, then it would only take about 17 years for 8GB blocks to be safe. I've already been involved with bitcoin for nearly a third of that amount of time!

[TomZ]

Relevant wiki page; http://bitcoinfactswiki.github.io/Scalability/

[iFixBTCmemoryIssues]

Just like the people claiming Bitcoin is a flash in the pan, people have been claiming Moore's law is coming to and end for decades now.
Both groups are always proven wrong in the longer term.

Regarding your numbers, you are assuming that 8MB is the maximum safe block size today.
I think a strong argument can be made that 20MB blocks are already safe today.
If we still take your ultra conservative estimate of 3 years for each doubling, 8GB blocks would be safe in closer to 25 years from now.

If we assume the doubling period is every two years, as Wikipedia states for Moore's Law, then it would only take about 17 years for 8GB blocks to be safe. I've already been involved with bitcoin for nearly a third of that amount of time!

But they say you know nothing!!!!!!!!!