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

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 <david.vorick@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mar 29, 2017 12:20 PM, "Andrew Johnson" <andrew.johnson83@gmail.com> 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