Author: Peter Todd 2014-03-26 10:58:02
Published on: 2014-03-26T10:58:02+00:00
In this email thread, Peter Todd and Gavin Andresen have a fundamental disagreement over Bitcoin's scalability. Todd argues that Bitcoin doesn't scale due to the bandwidth required to update the state of the UTXO set when creating a block, resulting in O(n^2) scaling. Andresen disagrees and cites Satoshi's original thoughts on scaling, which envisioned tens of thousands of mining nodes and hundreds of millions of lightweight SPV users. Todd points out that there are currently only a few pools due to miners finding it unfeasible to mine on their own, but if individual miners were counted, it would reach the scale Andresen was pointing out. Todd draws a sharp line between mining and hashing, stating that the former requires a full node, which is a fixed cost overhead related to the number of transactions per second, discouraging decentralization and encouraging centralization. He believes tree chains can help decentralization by allowing any miner to participate fully at the same level as any other miner by mining some section of the tree. This reduces the resources needed to keep up with that part of the tree and only grows logarithmically with the total transaction volume.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T15:43:15.998211+00:00