One eye-opening 'flaw' of Bitcoins...

I have been out of the loop for a while, but testing the waters on Evo forced me to install the Bitcoin client on my pc because I had to generate info for multi-sig. Imagine my horror when a couple of days later I get an error message saying my SSD was full... I was like, 'wut?'. And then of course, I couldn't just uninstall it because I wasn't really in the groove and knew that I had a wallet address tied to my multi-sig (and two days of bandwidth), so I had to muddle about and do an ugly sym-link hack to move the damned blockchain to another hard drive (you can use the -datadir way too, but I moved the whole thing out of appdata).

So, ummm... Just how big is this shit planning to get? I assume it will simply continue to grow, nonstop, forever, and if you want an up to date wallet you will have to carry the stone of shame on shackled to your ankle for all time? I can rationalize 30+ Gig for underage animal snuff pr0n, but the size of the blockchain data is off the hook.

The average adult has 22 square feet of skin. Even with the finest tattoo needle there is no chance of carrying this info around on your person anymore. If we get a Carrington event strong enough to overwhelm my galvanized garbage can Faraday cage full of thumb drives, how will I get my hamster steroid order finalized?


Comments


[5 Points] None:

Stop smoking crack. Please.


[3 Points] sobulbous:

You need to open your eyes a bit more, you do not need to download the entire blockchain.


[2 Points] None:

Well, people hope that computer technology will continue to grow faster, so in the future if its 500GB we'll have 100TB harddrives.


[1 Points] tucherrrr:

You don't need to download blockchain for multisig.


[1 Points] throwahooawayyfoe:

Unless you want to run a full node or need to use bitcoind for something, there's no reason to be using a full client such as bitcoin core (formerly qt). If all you're doing is storing bitcoins, get yourself a lightweight client like multibit or electrum. They don't need to have the full blockchain on the local machine and only sync up back to a certain point, which saves a ton of space on your hard drive and makes the process of syncing to the network infinitely faster.


[1 Points] gwern:

knew that I had a wallet address tied to my multi-sig (and two days of bandwidth), so I had to muddle about and do an ugly sym-link hack to move the damned blockchain to another hard drive (you can use the -datadir way too, but I moved the whole thing out of appdata).

That was a circular way of doing things. bitcoind/-qt lets you export your wallet (the private keys, basically); then you can delete the downloads to reclaim all the space, and import the private keys into a lightweight client like Electrum.


[1 Points] gwern:

knew that I had a wallet address tied to my multi-sig (and two days of bandwidth), so I had to muddle about and do an ugly sym-link hack to move the damned blockchain to another hard drive (you can use the -datadir way too, but I moved the whole thing out of appdata).

That was a circular way of doing things. bitcoind/-qt lets you export your wallet (the private keys, basically); then you can delete the downloads to reclaim all the space, and import the private keys into a lightweight client like Electrum.