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Showing posts from December, 2017

Could bitcoin mining lead to exploring internet bandwidth issues?

Highly recommend the original white paper on crypto written by Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf Short read, not too much math, extremely well written and describes in depth not only the motivation and design, but potential vulnerabilities and why they are not practical threats. One interesting problem not addressed is explosive growth in block size. Recall that: - blocks are limited to one every ~10 mins by self adjusting difficulty - blocks must contain all transactions from previous 10 minutes Currently we are doing about 400k transactions per day, and one block = ~1MB. If we assume transaction count is roughly proportional to the amount of people using the currency, we could see 100x or 1000x growth in transaction volume. So we're looking at 100mb or 1GB blocks. This would create a bandwidth issue, every node has to download 1GB every 10 minutes, there would be propagation delays. I don't think this is a huge problem - networks are gettin