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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday May 20 2015, @01:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the grow-or-die dept.

In a test of Bitcoin's ability to adapt to its own growing popularity, the Bitcoin community is facing a dilemma: how to change Bitcoin's core software so that the growing volume of transactions doesn't overwhelm the network. Some fear that the network, as it's currently designed, could become overwhelmed as early as next year.

The answer will help determine the form Bitcoin's network takes as it matures. But the loose-knit community of Bitcoin users is not in agreement over how it should proceed, and the nature of Bitcoin, a technology neither owned nor controlled by any one person or entity, could make the impending decision-making process challenging. At the very least it represents a cloud of uncertainty hanging over Bitcoin's long-term future.

The technical problem, which most agree is solvable, is that Bitcoin's network now has a fixed capacity for transactions. Before he or she disappeared, Bitcoin's mysterious creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, limited the size of a "block," or group of transactions, to one megabyte.

Under the one-megabyte-per-block limit, the network can process only about three transactions per second. If Bitcoin becomes a mainstream payment system, or even a platform for all kinds of other online business besides payments (see "Why Bitcoin Could Be Much More Than a Currency"), it's going to have to process a lot more. Visa, by comparison, says its network can process more than 24,000 transactions per second.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/537486/leaderless-bitcoin-struggles-to-make-its-most-crucial-decision/

 
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by JNCF on Wednesday May 20 2015, @02:02PM

    by JNCF (4317) on Wednesday May 20 2015, @02:02PM (#185468) Journal

    I don't think that every end-user needs their own full copy of the blockchain locally stored. You can store your private keys offline but use public APIs (accessed from a different computer) for queries and transaction propgations. A signed transaction can be safely propogated to an untrusted Bitcoin-peer without worrying about it being tampered with. Queried data could theoretically be wrong, but it would be ridiculously difficult to forge if you wait for a decent number of confirmations (new blocks hashed after the relevant block) and verify that the last, say, 10 blocks were all based on each other and of a decent size. I've never actually bothered to, but I could see doing it if I were engaged in some large transaction and wanted to be sure that the funds were definitely sent to my address. I keep the testnet chain stored locally, for reasons, but mostly just use APIs for transactions. The blockchain doesn't need to be on every smartphone. Miners seem to still have plenty of incentive to keep storing the blockchain, and that's all we really need.

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