Bitcoin Forum

Other => Beginners & Help => Topic started by: TheVision on June 12, 2011, 11:46:09 AM



Title: Transaction processing misconception?
Post by: TheVision on June 12, 2011, 11:46:09 AM
Hello Community,

i'm from germany, so excuse and gramatical mistakes ;)

I'm just at the beginning of understanding the whole bitcoin concept. As far as i understood it up to now, EVERY client participating in the bitcoin network has to process ALL transactions generated by the network.
Currently there are approx. 130.000 blocks which have to be processed by my client if i start using bitcoin. This took arround 4 hours on my machine to finish. Currently every day there are approx. 250 new blocks which have to be processed too. At this point this is not a performance problem.

But what will happen if Bitcoin get so popular, that millions of people will use it every day for some transactions?

My wallet is only recieving any money someone send to me if it has processed the block the specific transaction was in. If the amount of transactions will exeed my computers processing capacity it will take longer and longer for me to recieve money. First this will perhaps be just an hour, later is possibily could be a day or more.

Is there something i did not understood or is there a misconception which will emerge only if bitcoin will get a heavy used thing?

Hope i could point out my "problem" ;)

Regards,
TheVision


Title: Re: Transaction processing misconception?
Post by: wegotpickles on June 12, 2011, 12:04:19 PM
As i understand it each client downloads all of the blocks, but there is little processing power involved. What makes it take so long to download the entire block chain is that rather than connecting to a high speed central server, you are connecting to many peers on their connections of various speeds, so this creates a degree of latency. Processing power will likely never be a problem for clients, however it could eventually take a very long time to download the entire chain. Once the entire chain is downloaded, there shouldn't be any problems keeping up regardless how popular the network becomes, but in the mid-to-distant future it could possibly take days to download the entire chain!

Again, this is as I understand it, I could be wrong.


Title: Re: Transaction processing misconception?
Post by: TheVision on June 12, 2011, 12:29:52 PM
That makes sense ;)

But possibly here is the next problem. As far is i observed it the 130.000 blocks of the chain where several hundred MB's large. Is all the data permanently stored on the local computer or is this just needed for calculation of some hashes and is "thrown away" after beeing processed?


Title: Re: Transaction processing misconception?
Post by: bittersweet on June 12, 2011, 12:35:49 PM
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability


Title: Re: Transaction processing misconception?
Post by: vov4ic on September 22, 2012, 11:19:49 AM
Hello Community