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Re:What Bitcoin Is, and Why It Matters by qntm on Thursday May 26, 2011 @11:04AM (#2587970)
Does everybody in the world who uses Bitcoins also keep a copy of the global transaction record? Isn't that going to become colossal very quickly?
Re:What Bitcoin Is, and Why It Matters by A554551N4710N on Thursday May 26, 2011 @01:58PM (#2588748)
yes, which is a major problem... hopefully one which they can release an update to rectify
Re:What Bitcoin Is, and Why It Matters by joe_the_user on Thursday May 26, 2011 @03:40PM (#2589139)
But first you'd have to figure-out how to solve the problem.

"Everyone" keeps a record to keep everyone else honest. If only some people kept records, they'd become the authorities and this would stand in the way of the system being decentralized.

Re:What Bitcoin Is, and Why It Matters by minikomi on Thursday May 26, 2011 @08:43PM (#2590003)
Is it not possible to periodically start fresh, from an agreed upon point?
Re:What Bitcoin Is, and Why It Matters by joe_the_user on Friday May 27, 2011 @03:33PM (#2592775)
I am not sure how you would do it. As I understand it, the bitcoin distributed hash approach relies on transactions being "verifiable" to avoid the process of actively and complete verifying everything. But any "restart" would have to actually do this active verification. Still, perhaps someone who knows could describe how this could work.

Further, even a restart would involve everyone in the world having a record of how much money everyone else in the world had.

Anyway, the mind boggles thinking about how this could possibly work.