Author: Gavin Andresen 2014-03-25 12:45:00
Published on: 2014-03-25T12:45:00+00:00
Peter Todd, a Bitcoin developer, claimed in an email that "Bitcoin doesn't scale" and cited the UTXO (unspent transaction output) set as the most fundamental issue. He explained that updating the UTXO set requires bandwidth equal to all the transaction volume, which leads to an O(n^2) scaling problem that isn't feasible. However, Gavin Andresen, Chief Scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation, disagreed with Todd's claim and argued that Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin's creator, originally envisioned tens of thousands of mining nodes and hundreds of millions of lightweight SPV users. He stated that scaling is only a problem if every person is a fully validating node, and with tens of thousands of fully validating nodes, the scaling problem becomes O(m*n), where m is the number of fully validating peers and is a large constant (10s of thousands). While it is unknown how large m can or will be, Andresen believes that Bitcoin will scale.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T15:48:44.401194+00:00