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Comment by alandarev | Hacker News Reader

But BitCoin community is against abusing the financial block-chain for general purpose [0]. Reducing bloat is good, but why bloat it in first place?

[0] - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Alternative_chain#Objective

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I've been doing some analysis of the bitcoin blockchain and there are only around 17,400 transactions that take up a total of 16 MB in transactions and 550KB of OP_RETURN data. Some protocols use OP_CHECKMULTISIG, OP_CHECKSIG and other methods so this doesn't account for everything.

However, the vast majority of bitcoin blockchain "bloat" is from standard bitcoin transactions.

Financial and accounting data has always contained more than just integer values of credit and debit. Who, how, when and why are just as important to good bookkeeping as to what was transacted.

Blockstore, by creating transferable digital property in the form of a key/value store, creates an economic incentive to use Bitcoin. Right now, Bitcoin needs all the help it can get. Consumer adoption will not happen if Bitcoin is just trying to be a public ledger of integer values that attempts to compete with MasterCard and Western Union.

Good thing is that no one really controls block chain.

Not the past blockchain - but isn't the future blockchain format subject to changes?

No single entity controls it, but that doesn't mean you can do whatever you want. If someone is abusing the blockchain by bloating it with useless garbage, there will be consensus for fixing that. So don't build a business or technology around abusing Bitcoin's blockchain, because you will be left out.

Why not set clear rules? 1 byte of blockchain costs XXX millibitcoins. You like it — you use it. You don't like it — you don't use it. It's clear that if anyone can use blockchain as information storage, someone WILL do it, now or later. I think it's better to set the rules sooner than fix things later when they are out of control.

Don't bitcoin transaction fees provide a means to handle that without resort to fixed centralized policy?

No, because the miner who gets the fee isn't the only one who will have to work extra. All full nodes will have to relay and store that transaction. And there is no known way to pay full node operators in a way that can't be abused.

It's tough to set any simple firm rules that maintain the right incentives, because (roughly) each byte incurs costs on every node storing/verifying the blockchain, while any set one-time fee can only be collected by some subset of those nodes up-front.

Thus you can expect continuing push-and-pull negotiations, perhaps requiring a separate system of continued payments, if you really want indefinite, reliable, unalterable storage.

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