Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: What are the downsides to 8MB blocks?
by
ranochigo
on 30/08/2015, 05:03:10 UTC
Why would you need 2 TB SSD to store 512 MB of data? (we are talking about running a node here, right?) Even if you wanted to store the full blockchain 2 TB HDDs are cheap and would be enough for long time to the future.

How do you maintain all blockchain when block size limit will be 8 MB? Blockchain is almost 50 GB already. It'll be 63 GB before new year. Imagine we see 8 MB blocks every 10 minutes. Even 2 TB would be obsolete in 5 years.
If you don't want any problems you don't store your blockchain in HDD. You need a good SSD. Running Bitcoin Core is very expensive even right now.
SSD is not a viable option for most. SSD is quite expensive due to the speed and they don't help much except in the initial synchronization when it would help to speed up the synchronizing process. But headers-first synchronization would have already speed up this process largely already, when block pruning is implemented fully, most don't need to store the entire blockchain. SPV clients are pretty much the option for everyone, they offer good features while occupying small space.

Bandwidth don't come at a cheap price and some ISP in the world have cap on the bandwidth. This could pose as a problem.