mindstalk: (Default)
mindstalk ([personal profile] mindstalk) wrote2019-04-24 07:51 pm

fundamental blockchain problems 2

A simpler take on https://mindstalk.dreamwidth.org/511477.html

If everyone used Bitcoin, you could use it twice in your lifetime.

Global life expectancy is 70 years, which is around 2 billion seconds, which allows for 14 billion Bitcoin transactions, given a hard limit of 7 per second. There are 7 billion people, so in that 70 year span, two transactions per person.

Currency of the future, I tell ya...
l33tminion: (Skilled)

[personal profile] l33tminion 2019-04-25 07:56 pm (UTC)(link)
That's not a "foundational blockchain problem", the other properties don't really depend on the block-size being small. Though anything that increases the number of transactions is going to increase storage space and bandwidth costs, so it still might not scale. And re Bitcoin specifically there's a coordination problem involved in changing the block size. (Someone already tried to do that with a hard fork, and so far that does not seem to be going particularly well.)