Replying to Avatar Nice and Kind Vic

The biggest technical risk to Bitcoin has been, and remains to be, the continual growth of the UTXO set. As this continues to grow, under the current model, it will become less possible to run a Bitcoin node on low end hardware. This will inevitably lead to centralization if we don't take adequate action.

This is a true regardless of usage of OP_RETURN, Counterparty, Bitcoin Stamps, Inscriptions, Runes, Bare multisig outputs, but the aforementioned have exacerbated the problem bringing what would have been future concerns years out, into the relative present.
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stupleb 1y ago

People are still trying to run Bitcoin on Raspberry Pis

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Nice and Kind Vic 1y ago

I'm still running some nodes on Raspberry Pis, but that will be migrated completely before end of year.

But that's a temporary measure. The refurbished PCs I'm moving to (i5s or i7s with 16 GB of ram) will only be a stop-gap measure that at best, may last a year or two before needing to upgrade to more serious hardware.

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stupleb 1y ago

16GB lasting for just one year?... we'll see I suppose.

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jin 🧙‍♂️ 1y ago

Might I ask the problem with doing so if one has suitable hard drive space?

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stupleb 1y ago

It's not the drive space that's the issue, but rather holding >8GB of UTXOs (thanks to ordinals, monkey jpegs, stamps, etc) in 8GB of RAM and needing to verify it all, not being able to, and then needing to thrash a slow external and poorly powered USB drive in the attempt. A new sync is now probably out of the question. Continuing with one already synced will be a struggle up until each block takes >10mins to verify, at which point... dead.

3c
3cd86488... 1y ago

average consumer laptop in 2024 needs at least 32gb ram

rpis dont even run web browsers properly, why would you need to run bitcoin node on low end hardware? 5 years forward, and average consumer laptop has 64 gb ram and its ddr6.