Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Hard fork proposal from last week's meeting

From: Aymeric Vitte <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2017 19:14:50 +0200

Well it's not going off-topic since the btc folks need now to find a way
to counter the attack

The disk space story is know to be a non issue, because encouraging
people to run nodes while they don't know how to dedicate the right
storage space that is trivial and not expensive to get today is just
stupid, they should not try to run full nodes, and no I tested with non
SSD drives, I was more wondering about cpu and bandwidth use, but did
not notice any impact, just stopped because a repeated sw bug or drive
issue desynched the chain and bitcoin-qt was trying to reload it from
the begining each time, which in my case was taking 10 days despite of
good bandwidth (which would allow me to torrent the entire chain + state
in less than 20 hours), so I stopped after the 3rd crash, setting up a
full node on my servers is still in the todo list (very low priority for
the reasons already explained)

Running a prune node implies first to setup a full node, so the same
problematic applies and then the advantage of pruning is not really
obvious, I don't know what's the strange story about "archival nodes", I
proposed something else

Back to the topic, the conclusion is that this is not difficult at all
for many people to run efficient full nodes, ideally the community
should promote this, seed a torrent with a recent state, implement a
patch to defeat BU plans and have everybody upgrade

But of course this will not happen

Le 29/03/2017 à 18:41, Andrew Johnson a écrit :
> I believe that as we continue to add users to the system by scaling
> capacity that we will see more new nodes appear, but I'm at a bit of a
> loss as to how to empirically prove it. 
>
> I do see your point on increasing load on archival nodes, but the
> majority of that load is going to come from new nodes coming online,
> they're the only ones going after very old blocks.   I could see that
> as a potential attack vector, overwhelm the archival nodes by spinning
> up new nodes constantly, therefore making it difficult for a "real"
> new node to get up to speed in a reasonable amount of time. 
>
> Perhaps the answer there would be a way to pay an archival node a
> small amount of bitcoin in order to retrieve blocks older than a
> certain cutoff?  Include an IP address for the node asking for the
> data as metadata in the transaction...  Archival nodes could set and
> publish their own policy, let the market decide what those older
> blocks are worth.  Would also help to incentivize running archival
> node, which we do need.  Of course, this isn't very user friendly. 
>
> We can take this to bitcoin-discuss, if we're getting too far off topic.
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 29, 2017 at 11:25 AM David Vorick <[email-masked]
> <mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
>
>
>     On Mar 29, 2017 12:20 PM, "Andrew Johnson"
>     <[email-masked] <mailto:[email-masked]>>
>     wrote:
>
>         What's stopping these users from running a pruned node?  Not
>         every node needs to store a complete copy of the blockchain. 
>
>
>     Pruned nodes are not the default configuration, if it was the
>     default configuration then I think you would see far more users
>     running a pruned node.
>
>     But that would also substantially increase the burden on archive
>     nodes.
>
>
>     Further discussion about disk space requirements should be taken
>     to another thread.
>
>
> -- 
> Andrew Johnson
>

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