in most europa, up and down are unlimited in volume.
but speed ... 5-10 MBit/s in download ... and less than 1MBit/s in upload.
so, yes ... bitcoin blockchain with blocks limited to 20Mb can be a problem ... for private nodes.
maybe satoshi have right to say "when the time comes, only professionnals nodes can efficiently provides bitcoin network with blockchain data"
professionnal node = 1GBit/s ... synchronised (UP and DOWN).
I am showing much higher averages in europe -
http://explorer.netindex.com/mapsCheck for yourself.
That's what 20 MB blocks require. That means, you receive the blockchain, that's 84 gigabytes per month. You send the blockchain to one peer, that's another 84 gigabytes per month.
We understand the tradeoffs... Aren't you being somewhat of an alarmist and misleading by only discussing 20MBs? Don't you expect to see the exact same blocksize after the hardfork with an occasional 2MB block? When do you assume we will be pegged at 20 MB blocks? Why are most blocks only 30-40% full now when the limit is higher?
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Everyone needs to read Mike Hearns recent article on why the blocksize limit needs to increase -
https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-capacity-cliff-586d1bf7715e The lightning network and other solutions aren't going to be ready for at least 2 years.
Additionally, keep in mind Merkle tree pruning is going to be released in 0.11 as well allowing for full pruned nodes at 1 GB in size.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/commit/f9ec3f0fadb11ee9889af977e16915f5d6e01944#diff-c865a8939105e6350a50af02766291b7R1182https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/33oz97/just_merged_pruning_support_in_bitcoin_core_run_a/