Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency

Re:Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency by lmm on Tuesday January 16, 2018 @06:09AM (#16157331)

> If you want to handle as many transaction as for example Visa, you would need 1 GB blocks every 10 minutes, which would make the whole blockchain heavily centralized because regular users won't be able to host full nodes to validate payments.

The whole blockchain is already "centralized" in that sense - almost all mining happens in a small number of large mining pools.

1GB every 10 minutes doesn't sound so bad. Random users probably won't run full chains on their desktops, sure, but the option's available if they want to (in distinct contrast to Lightning). Third-party service providers could run full chains and sell validation against the full chain as a service, in a competitive free market - you don't need anyone's permission to run the full chain, so if prices get high or service gets bad then another provider can enter the market.

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Re:Goldman Sachs Report Explores Use of Bitcoin as Currency by anthonybsd on Tuesday January 16, 2018 @09:32AM (#16158396)

That's 52 petabytes a year, half an exabyte after 10 years. We are talking about approaching Google datacenter scale on ...every...single....bitcoin node. No matter how optimistic your future storage capacity projections are this is simply not scalable.

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