Author: Tom Harding 2015-05-14 15:22:41
Published on: 2015-05-14T15:22:41+00:00
The capacity of Bitcoin is a concern and if it continues to grow, fewer individuals would be able to run full nodes. However, the alternative is running a full node on the Bitcoin settlement network while massive numbers of people give up any hope of directly owning Bitcoin at all. The Lightning Network will have to consolidate global payments by a factor of 25000:1 to fit into Bitcoin's current 4tps capacity as a settlement network. This makes it expensive for current holders to sell or spend. Forcing block capacity to stay small so that individuals can run full nodes is what will force Bitcoin to become too expensive for individuals to use. The solution may lie in scalable SPV-level security that enables individuals collectively to make up the majority of the network. A scalable DHT-type network of nodes could store and index the exhaustive and fast-growing corpus of transaction history, up to and including currently unconfirmed transactions. Each individual node could host a slice of the transaction set with a configurable size. This network would be run by the community and miners and other full nodes would depend on it, which is rather critical as those nodes grow closer to data-center proportions.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T21:03:19.718886+00:00