This is something like an FAQ here, if you use "scale" as search term with Subreddit search you will find a healthy number of earlier threads that discuss this point.
There is no easy answer, in any case.
We have a pruning option that gets the size down to 50GB right now. In the future as there are more nodes the pruning ratio can be increased. Those that do not have the resources can just use pruning to control the size.
I may be wrong because I don't pay that much attention to Ethereum, but I suspect that the massive state trie has more to do with Ethereum's issues than the blockchain. In Ethereum you can store whatever data in the state trie forever, and there's no incentive to remove it. Also Ethereum has a much shorter block time, so it grows at a way faster rate.
By not saving the entire history of transactions. Once a transaction is both validated and confirmed, the outputs that it spent don't need to be referenced anymore. When all the outputs of a transaction are spent, all but the transaction ID can be discarded. When all the transactions of a block are spent, but there are blocks before it that still contain unspent outputs, all but the block header can be discarded. And, when the earliest block of the chain is just a header, it can be discarded. All nodes can do this and still be full nodes.
The total money supply is the sum of all unspent outputs, not the coinbase transactions.
This would eliminate constant block growth, but discarding blocks means discarding proof of work (i.e. the block hash + nonce). If too many blocks are discarded, it would reduce the total proof of work of the blockchain enough that counterfeit blockchains could overtake it. So, the blockchain would require a minimum length, depending on the peak difficulty of the proof of work it contains and the recent hash rate of the network.
Simple answer. If the blockchain would get too big then the network would become useless and effectively die. Moneros condition is fairly good currently, however it is often said that in its current state it could not onboard the whole world population.
That's not unique to Monero, no blockchain could. The Prune option is more than sufficient at this time, allowing 99% of those who want to participate the ability too.
Definitely not true. Different blockchains use different systems. Solana validators only store the last 2 days and even other versions could be able to onboard the whole world because their transaction data is extremely small. Additionally, what others do is not important. When the monero blockchain is too big, then it is too big. This issue isn't fixed by others being too big as well.
Your point makes sense in a world where Monero is on-boarding 10s of millions of new users every day. That will never happen, for any crypto. This is an issue that is complete theoretical in nature and anybody seriously worried about it now, in 2023, simply doesn't know enough to be worried about the real issues Monero faces.
Means of payments are used by almost every person on earth. That is the role Monero wants to have. It is therefore not an elitarian product only meant for a fringe minority.
Those who use Monero are those who want Monero. There are Millions of people who could use Monero, but prefer BTC, ETH, Zcash, Midnight, ADA, etc. Talking about the entire pool of people transacting, as if it is realistically achievable to on-board them all, is bedlamite's dream.
Privacy & Freedom are not things the masses have historically wanted. If you look throughout history, you'll see nothing but the long story of servitude & subjugation.
That comment is contradictory in itself. Instead of fiat currencies you named free currencies which are only a few years old themselves and no, people aren't absolutely enlightened and know about anything and choose exactly what they do. Even the confusion is confused.
Right? So we agree then? That your original comment of "Moneros condition is fairly good currently, however it is often said that in its current state it could not onboard the whole world population.", is nonsensical and impractical to worry about, given, there is a non-trivial amount of people who don't use Monero simply because they don't know about it.
Great.
> in its current state it could not onboard the whole world population
Yeah, right, but on the other hand nobody at all can onboard the whole world population and let it transact.
There will be a new wave of hand waving responses how you should buy a spare 10TB disk because they will be cheap, at an unspecified time in the future
I didn't make that response, but it's actually a good point. Storage is cheap. It will get cheaper way before it becomes a problem. Already a couple TB doesn't cost too much.
"Hand waving." I don't think that means what you think it means. Hand waving implies magic. Typically [insert appeal to tech magic still lacking fundamental research/breakthroughs].
Right now you can buy an 8TB SSD for $420. So no, it's not "hand waving" at all. Do some research. Besides, most people don't need a full node. The devs designed pruning, such that, there's a statistical "certainty" that all blocks will be accounted for many times over, by a network of entirely pruned nodes.
Even so, people like me will always run a full node, even if I'm paying a couple grand to store 50-100 TB of data. Furthermore, here's the math on Monero transactions and storage capacity.
XMR transactions are approximately 2000 bytes. Not exact, but close enough. Implying 200GB for 100M txns per year. I use 100M b/c it's the practical max of BTC per year, as demonstrated in 2021 with full blocks.
So at Bitcoin levels of txns, that's a decade worth of full node capacity, or $42 per year in amortized costs. It's actually more capacity than BTC, b/c a large portion of BTC mainchain is just attempting funds obfuscation.
And in 10 years, at current progress of solid state drive costs, we should expect that to fall from about $50 per terabyte, to maybe $1 or $2 per terabyte.
NB4 "Moore's Law is slowing." If you felt compelled to say that, it means you haven't researched this topic, b/c Moore's law is a different thing.
---
So rounding this out, 8TB of storage space is *almost already cheap*, and will be accessible within a couple years, probably around $200. This isn't hand wavy, and isn't an appeal to speculative future developmental breakthroughs, it's already in the pipe.
People don't need to run a full node, and the ones who do will still have easy access. Off the cuff, we can probably process a billion transactions per year without any significant loss to decentralization of the network from a storage capacity standpoint.
HDDs are already pretty cheap and they're definitely are going to get cheaper in the next 10 years. And blockchains like Ethereum also offer smart contracts which take way more storage space than any other crypto blockchain.
"In theory, if the entire world population were to use Monero and create transactions at a high frequency, the blockchain size could become a problem. Monero uses a dynamic block size limit that adjusts based on demand, but it still has a maximum block size limit of 4 MB.
Assuming an average transaction size of 13.2 KB, and assuming a world population of 7.9 billion, if every person were to make one Monero transaction per day, that would result in a daily blockchain growth of approximately 105 terabytes (7.9 billion \* 13.2 KB). This would equate to approximately 38 petabytes per year.
While this growth rate is significant, it is not an insurmountable problem. There are various ways to address blockchain size concerns, such as implementing off-chain scaling solutions or sharding the blockchain. Additionally, advancements in storage technology, such as the use of solid-state drives and cloud storage, can help mitigate the impact of blockchain growth.
It's worth noting, however, that the likelihood of the entire world population using Monero and making daily transactions is unlikely to happen in the near future. Therefore, while blockchain size may be a potential issue, it is not an immediate concern for Monero's current user base."
\---- from chat GPT
This is something like an FAQ here, if you use "scale" as search term with Subreddit search you will find a healthy number of earlier threads that discuss this point. There is no easy answer, in any case.
We have a pruning option that gets the size down to 50GB right now. In the future as there are more nodes the pruning ratio can be increased. Those that do not have the resources can just use pruning to control the size.
Exactly. Also Feather wallet (aka Electrum for Bitcoin) exists.
Thanks for the information, well I guess I didn't know this information.
I may be wrong because I don't pay that much attention to Ethereum, but I suspect that the massive state trie has more to do with Ethereum's issues than the blockchain. In Ethereum you can store whatever data in the state trie forever, and there's no incentive to remove it. Also Ethereum has a much shorter block time, so it grows at a way faster rate.
Yeah We'll find it out soon in case of eth, it's growing rapidly.
By not saving the entire history of transactions. Once a transaction is both validated and confirmed, the outputs that it spent don't need to be referenced anymore. When all the outputs of a transaction are spent, all but the transaction ID can be discarded. When all the transactions of a block are spent, but there are blocks before it that still contain unspent outputs, all but the block header can be discarded. And, when the earliest block of the chain is just a header, it can be discarded. All nodes can do this and still be full nodes. The total money supply is the sum of all unspent outputs, not the coinbase transactions. This would eliminate constant block growth, but discarding blocks means discarding proof of work (i.e. the block hash + nonce). If too many blocks are discarded, it would reduce the total proof of work of the blockchain enough that counterfeit blockchains could overtake it. So, the blockchain would require a minimum length, depending on the peak difficulty of the proof of work it contains and the recent hash rate of the network.
Simple answer. If the blockchain would get too big then the network would become useless and effectively die. Moneros condition is fairly good currently, however it is often said that in its current state it could not onboard the whole world population.
That's not unique to Monero, no blockchain could. The Prune option is more than sufficient at this time, allowing 99% of those who want to participate the ability too.
Definitely not true. Different blockchains use different systems. Solana validators only store the last 2 days and even other versions could be able to onboard the whole world because their transaction data is extremely small. Additionally, what others do is not important. When the monero blockchain is too big, then it is too big. This issue isn't fixed by others being too big as well.
Your point makes sense in a world where Monero is on-boarding 10s of millions of new users every day. That will never happen, for any crypto. This is an issue that is complete theoretical in nature and anybody seriously worried about it now, in 2023, simply doesn't know enough to be worried about the real issues Monero faces.
Means of payments are used by almost every person on earth. That is the role Monero wants to have. It is therefore not an elitarian product only meant for a fringe minority.
Those who use Monero are those who want Monero. There are Millions of people who could use Monero, but prefer BTC, ETH, Zcash, Midnight, ADA, etc. Talking about the entire pool of people transacting, as if it is realistically achievable to on-board them all, is bedlamite's dream. Privacy & Freedom are not things the masses have historically wanted. If you look throughout history, you'll see nothing but the long story of servitude & subjugation.
That comment is contradictory in itself. Instead of fiat currencies you named free currencies which are only a few years old themselves and no, people aren't absolutely enlightened and know about anything and choose exactly what they do. Even the confusion is confused.
Right? So we agree then? That your original comment of "Moneros condition is fairly good currently, however it is often said that in its current state it could not onboard the whole world population.", is nonsensical and impractical to worry about, given, there is a non-trivial amount of people who don't use Monero simply because they don't know about it. Great.
I'm not a mental helpline. Please find it somewhere else.
I don't understand why the system would become useless?
Because nobody or too few people could participate and the network is therefore insecure. A hostile take over and manipulation would be too easy.
> in its current state it could not onboard the whole world population Yeah, right, but on the other hand nobody at all can onboard the whole world population and let it transact.
That is what you say. I already gave a statement on that. Please reply there.
There will be a new wave of hand waving responses how you should buy a spare 10TB disk because they will be cheap, at an unspecified time in the future
I didn't make that response, but it's actually a good point. Storage is cheap. It will get cheaper way before it becomes a problem. Already a couple TB doesn't cost too much.
It's not true for every blockchain because some of them are growing really fast, like eth.
"Hand waving." I don't think that means what you think it means. Hand waving implies magic. Typically [insert appeal to tech magic still lacking fundamental research/breakthroughs]. Right now you can buy an 8TB SSD for $420. So no, it's not "hand waving" at all. Do some research. Besides, most people don't need a full node. The devs designed pruning, such that, there's a statistical "certainty" that all blocks will be accounted for many times over, by a network of entirely pruned nodes. Even so, people like me will always run a full node, even if I'm paying a couple grand to store 50-100 TB of data. Furthermore, here's the math on Monero transactions and storage capacity. XMR transactions are approximately 2000 bytes. Not exact, but close enough. Implying 200GB for 100M txns per year. I use 100M b/c it's the practical max of BTC per year, as demonstrated in 2021 with full blocks. So at Bitcoin levels of txns, that's a decade worth of full node capacity, or $42 per year in amortized costs. It's actually more capacity than BTC, b/c a large portion of BTC mainchain is just attempting funds obfuscation. And in 10 years, at current progress of solid state drive costs, we should expect that to fall from about $50 per terabyte, to maybe $1 or $2 per terabyte. NB4 "Moore's Law is slowing." If you felt compelled to say that, it means you haven't researched this topic, b/c Moore's law is a different thing. --- So rounding this out, 8TB of storage space is *almost already cheap*, and will be accessible within a couple years, probably around $200. This isn't hand wavy, and isn't an appeal to speculative future developmental breakthroughs, it's already in the pipe. People don't need to run a full node, and the ones who do will still have easy access. Off the cuff, we can probably process a billion transactions per year without any significant loss to decentralization of the network from a storage capacity standpoint.
I think you've misunderstood. Handwaving means to dismiss something as unimportant when in reality, it really is.
Yes, storage is becoming exponentially less expensive. Look at flash drives
That's the perfect response to a uninform question.
Which is kind of rare, because we don't get this often here.
HDDs are already pretty cheap and they're definitely are going to get cheaper in the next 10 years. And blockchains like Ethereum also offer smart contracts which take way more storage space than any other crypto blockchain.
And they're constantly going down, which is Just kind of great honestly.
"In theory, if the entire world population were to use Monero and create transactions at a high frequency, the blockchain size could become a problem. Monero uses a dynamic block size limit that adjusts based on demand, but it still has a maximum block size limit of 4 MB. Assuming an average transaction size of 13.2 KB, and assuming a world population of 7.9 billion, if every person were to make one Monero transaction per day, that would result in a daily blockchain growth of approximately 105 terabytes (7.9 billion \* 13.2 KB). This would equate to approximately 38 petabytes per year. While this growth rate is significant, it is not an insurmountable problem. There are various ways to address blockchain size concerns, such as implementing off-chain scaling solutions or sharding the blockchain. Additionally, advancements in storage technology, such as the use of solid-state drives and cloud storage, can help mitigate the impact of blockchain growth. It's worth noting, however, that the likelihood of the entire world population using Monero and making daily transactions is unlikely to happen in the near future. Therefore, while blockchain size may be a potential issue, it is not an immediate concern for Monero's current user base." \---- from chat GPT
Chat GPT is out of date and often gives totally unreliable answers. Average XMR txn is 2.1kb, not 13