You mean... like this? https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident
> The bad transaction no longer exists for people using the longest chain. Therefore, the bitcoins created by it do not exist either. While the transaction does not exist anymore, the 0.5 BTC that was consumed by it does. It appears to have come from a faucet and has not been used since.[7]
Wait... so if you wait long enough then old transactions disappear ? I thought the whole blockchain could allow anyone to track every transactions ?
This is not true at all. On the last 10 blocks (495808-495817, ~6000 seconds) there were 22,277 txns and 49,746 txn inputs. That means a full node needs to look up on average only 8.3 inputs per second in the UTXO database. Assuming 1 I/O per lookup, that's 8 IOPS, which is a trivial workload, even on a non-SSD setup.
I am the author of this blog.zorinaq.com post and I can assure you the real-world I/O workload I see on this $5/month node is negligible.
Is anyone even actually doing that? Even several years ago when I last did it, the blockchain was 60+GB (now it's more than twice that) and you were never, ever going to get anything out of it other than heating the room up.
The way I thought most people were going was using something like Electrum, where you still have your own private wallet that nobody else controls, but you're not yourself a full node.
You don't even do anything with most of the DB once you have it.
That is false. There were even rollbacks in the early days. Don’t talk about a subject you haven’t personally experienced or taken the time to research.
Also, running a full Bitcoin node on a machine with a spinning rust disk and a relatively small amount of RAM is going to be hell - especially if that disk is heavily shared - because it has to do a lot of random reads from the chain state DB in order to retrieve outputs referenced by the transactions, with the number of reads scaling linearly with the block size. I think some of this may be skipped during the initial block download these days, but you can hit 1 minute plus per block easily just with the existing block size limit. It looks like the hosting provider he chose has some kind of SSD cache of unspecified size which might have helped, if everything fitted in it.