there are lots of foot guns for the user with this model. because transferring data between processes involves copying this can become a problem. Erlang tries to optimise the handling of large binaries by using a separate reference counted heap. however, this introduces another set of issues where memory is 'leaked' because a smaller binary is holding a reference to a larger binary or because processes that have not been GC'd have not decremented the ref count of large binaries in the heap that they no longer user.