Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Merits 1 from 1 user
Re: BRC-20 needs to be removed
by
larry_vw_1955
on 10/06/2023, 22:24:57 UTC
⭐ Merited by icopress (1)
That isn't a use case for *Bitcoin* in that it's something Bitcoin doesn't actually accommodate on a fundamental basis: Bitcoin nodes don't need to store or provide access to historical blocks to operate.  They only do today (to the extent they do, many don't) to aid new nodes coming up securely, but in the future that will be accomplished via other means because transferring terabytes of blockchain to process and throw away whenever someone starts a new node won't be sufficiently viable.
there's only one way to fully validate the current utxo set and that is by downloading the entire blockchain from the genesis block. if someone wants to trust some third party then  i guess that's up to them but internet speeds and storage space seem like they will able to support blockchain growth perhaps indefinitely since technology is always improving and we already have 20+TB drives. That's about a 40:1 ratio of unused to used space. You can bet that's going to get bigger in the future. people can already have a 1Gbps internet speed. That should be sufficient far into the future for downloading the blockchain. Blockchain grows at 0.1TB per year max, it takes how many years to fill up a 20TB HDD? In 100 years the blockchain will be at most about 10TB. On a 1Gbps connection you can download that in just over 1 day. In 100 years, 1Gbps probably will be something everyone has. No one is still on dialup.

The day when you can't download and fully validate the blockchain from the genesys block if you so desire is the day that bitcoin becomes meaningless. Because you won't know if it goes all the way back to satoshi or not.

Quote
So not only do you have to worry that it might become unavailable, it'll be inevitable, except in the sense that perhaps there may be some archive someplace or another that has the historical chain and might make it available to you at some cost.  
I don't share that point of view. Not with regards to ordinals and not in the next 100 years.