Hi guys, I got a question kind of related to this...
A friend of mine got some bitcoins a few years back, now he told me he can't operate with his old laptop (hard disk capacity issues, I guess he can't dowload the whole blockchain, and I say I guess cause I started reading about bitcoins just yesterday, to try to help him with his issue).
Question is, he needs to buy another pc, and the new one will have 2 hard drives (ssd 120gb for the apps and s.o. and another one 1TB). Is it possible to download your wallet and operate with bitcoins in the bigger 1TB HD? or you just have to use the s.o. hard drive, meaning 120 GB will be too little HD space?
thanks for your help
pablo
I believe the current size is somewhere around 140GB but I may be mistaken there. If he's hoping to run a full node or sync is wallet then judging by the size of the SSD he is going for then 120GB wouldn't be enough. 1TB will be find for now. I would probably recommend hosting on a traditional hard drive either way.
It will get too big one day but probably, hard drives and SSDs would be much cheaper so everyone would still be able to afford running a full node. The reason why most people don't support bigger blocks is this, people will no longer be able to run a node and only big companies will be able to so, so the network will be less decentralized and we don't want that.
I think one of the argument before this become a more well known concern was that technology would evolve with the size of the blocks too. Of course the size continues to grow at a very fast rate and seems to be growing too fast for technology to evolve.
Unless technology becomes cheaper, then it's only going to be the more wealthy and like you said big companies which are in control of the integrity of Bitcoin.