> that would make Bitcoin accessible for everyday transactions for millions/billions of people, are not even being attempted
I'm not sure if that's correct. There's absolutely no way bitcoin can support that many transactions with just sane blocksize increase.
As I've said in my other comments, bitcoin is a research facility, not a product, so it's somewhat understandable people are going with their own research directions.
People currently have huge expectations out of an immature technology. It's equivalent to expecting the Internet of the 80s to support MMORPGs with thousands of players, the protocols just weren't mature enough.
>>There's absolutely no way bitcoin can support that many transactions with just sane blocksize increase.
There's only one way to find out. This is what Satoshi said on the issue:
>“Long before the network gets anywhere near as large as that, it would be safe for users to use Simplified Payment Verification (section 8) to check for double spending, which only requires having the chain of block headers, or about 12KB per day. Only people trying to create new coins would need to run network nodes. At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with that one node.
>The bandwidth might not be as prohibitive as you think. A typical transaction would be about 400 bytes (ECC is nicely compact). Each transaction has to be broadcast twice, so lets say 1KB per transaction. Visa processed 37 billion transactions in FY2008, or an average of 100 million transactions per day. That many transactions would take 100GB of bandwidth, or the size of 12 DVD or 2 HD quality movies, or about $18 worth of bandwidth at current prices.
>If the network were to get that big, it would take several years, and by then, sending 2 HD movies over the Internet would probably not seem like a big deal."
Bitcoin is an experiment with many economic participants, and the parameters and goals of that experiment were changed mid-way through by key developers and forum moderators, without the agreement of all economic constituents.
So now it's not a currency, and it's not an store of value, it's just a research project.
It feels a tad bit irresponsible for the bitcoin community to have gone around advertising this as the currency (later store of value) of the future, while apparently not knowing if scaling to worldwide levels would even be possible.
I'm not sure if that's correct. There's absolutely no way bitcoin can support that many transactions with just sane blocksize increase.
As I've said in my other comments, bitcoin is a research facility, not a product, so it's somewhat understandable people are going with their own research directions.
People currently have huge expectations out of an immature technology. It's equivalent to expecting the Internet of the 80s to support MMORPGs with thousands of players, the protocols just weren't mature enough.