I drew some criticism for my earlier article - Moore’s Law and Data Storage for securing the Blockchain Part I, which I would like to address here.

Some of the arguments about securing the Blockchain and Moore’s Law were:

It’s about bandwidth, not transistor size

It’s not about the cost or size of a HDD.

When you have big blocks, the cost of running a node increases to the point that only miners can run a data centre size node.

While I can see why people think there is some merit to those claims, I’ll explain why with Moore’s Law; bandwidth is also improving, and how the cost and size of a hard drive IS relevant to securing the Blockchain. I’ll also point out with Moore’s Law that we are still seeing improvements, as recently as the last week.

7nm, 5nm and 3nm processes..

As of September 2018, mass production of 7 nm devices has begun. — Wikipedia

The first mainstream 7nm mobile processor intended for mass market use, the Apple A12 Bionic, which was released during September 2018. While AMD is currently working on their “Rome” workstation processors, which are based on the 7nm node and feature up to 64 cores.

Rome Benchmarks 7nm Process around 6 minutes 40 seconds.

The 5nm node was once assumed by some experts to be the end of Moore’s law, however in late 2017, IBM revealed that they had created 5nm silicon chips, using silicon nanosheets in a gate-all-around configuration.

Samsung Electronics has announced an update to its process node per year roadmap with the introduction of a 3nm gate-all-around (GAA)

In 2018, Samsung announced that they plan to use Gate-All-Around (GAAFET) technology to produce 3nm FETs in 2021 — as a FinFet successor.

As well as this ‘Graphcore Chips Could Speed Up AI by 100 Times’ — Less than a week ago this news was released.

Moore’s Law is alive and well, for now at least.

Bandwidth improvements..

We can look at empirical data — from Speedtest.net from the past 3 years to see how much bandwidth has improved from around the world.

We can see from the data that just like Moore’s Law, internet bandwidth (download/upload) as a by-product of improved networking technology has also improved. As infrastructure improves, internet speeds also improves, while bandwidth also becomes cheaper because more people have access to it.

The World Index tells us that in 2017:

Average Download Rates were 40Mbp/s and improved 32% since 2016.

Average Upload Rates were 19.96Mbp/s and improved 26% since 2016.

Moore’s Law isn’t about hard drive cost or size..

Moore’s law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years.

That assertion is 100% Correct. However I included Hard Drives (Storage) because it relates to securing the blockchain because we need hard drive space to put the blockchain on while we secure the network and check that what we have is indeed correct with the previous blocks that have been produced on the Bitcoin/Bitcoin Cash networks.

Big blocks increase the cost of running a node to the point that only miners can run a data centre size node.

No. You can run a home user node on a budget for around $250, or on your current rig for free. Here is a node I compiled quickly on pcpartpicker.com.au for under $214 USD complete with a case.

You can set up a node with the following:

200GB of free disk space, 2GB RAM, Internet with >50kbp/s upload.

An unmetered connection — Download usage is around 20 gigabytes a month, plus around an additional 130 gigabytes the first time you start your node. It’s common for full nodes on high-speed connections to use 200 gigabytes upload or more a month.

Alternatively you can also run an online hosted SPV node online for around $10 per month.

If you ARE a business and can afford a more expensive node..

You can run an on-chain payment network with the capacity of VISA using a $2,000 computer containing 3x8TB hard drives in a single mid-tower case for a year, and the cost for the second year’s hardware would be less than $600 total. — Bitcoinopoly

If you liked this article feel free to donate bitcoin cash as I spend my own time researching to write these articles and compile/produce them.

bitcoincash:qpz29uxj0gtgmqgmyumjcwe6yj7wc7qlnvpzaktz99

Thanks,

Michael Nunzio