The blockchain stores basically an immutable permanent record of every transaction. This means the data is constantly increasing. Wondering if one has a model for easily roughly estimating data usage. There is a link below that goes into some depth on financials for IPDB, but don't fully understand how to apply it to apps yet.
Either way, the blockchain generates lots of data. The more people, the faster the growth. At some point it seems you want to forget the history, as the brain doesn't remember every photon that touches a receptor, only remembering a small fraction of the "transactions".
The questions are:
- If anyone has figured out solutions on what to do with the data storage size. That is, if every transaction / change of data is permanently stored, then the data will only grow. Not sure what the growth curve looks like but it seems the link on IPDB has some suggestions. Wondering if there are any references here. This also doesn't seem environmentally practical.
- If there is any talk about compressing the data in the block chain so "archival" or old stuff can be stored in smaller form (like the freezer sorta thing).
- If there is any talk about compacting the data (i.e. removing the history but retaining the overall effect or state). This way the changes would stay permanent but at some point in the past there would be a wall where there is no further history (since it was all compacted). This would solve the problem of the data growing indefinitely.
References:
- https://medium.com/ipdb-blog/forever-isnt-free-the-cost-of-storage-on-a-blockchain-database-59003f63e01
- https://www.quora.com/How-can-blockchain-be-used-as-a-database-to-store-data
- https://nulltx.com/are-blockchains-actually-immutable/
- https://www.multichain.com/blog/2017/05/blockchain-immutability-myth/
