Bump :-)

As the use of bitcoin explodes exponentially, will we ever reach a point where transactions occur more quickly than they can practically be distributed to and verified by other nodes?

A much easier solution would be to have the client keep the wallet.dat file encrypted on your hard drive and only decrypt it in protected memory with a password supplied by the user on app startup.

Still, even the sparse version of the transaction chain (the smallest possible dataset required to validate the transactions), according to my limited understanding, will continue to grow in size indefinitely. I have serious doubts as to whether it could sustain anywhere near the volumes of transactions taking place in today's financial markets, and these volumes will only increase over time.

I'm concerned by the fact that, whenever I want to run bitcoin, my wallet.dat file stays unprotected. What is the point of storing an encrypted backup of my wallet when it remains unencrypted during runtime? Does anyone have any suggestions for how to avoid exposing my wallet in order to run bitcoin?

Thanks,
Carl

I've noticed that even with its relatively small number of users, it still takes a significant amount of time for a brand new installation of bitcoin to download all the transactions and be able to take part in the system. My Macbook Pro, for example, ran for many hours after installation before it had confirmed that a friend of mine had sent me some money.

So, my question is, what happens when orders of magnitude more users are using bitcoin? Will it take days, months or years to download all the transactions just to be able to participate in the system?

Does the system scale to the level currently supported by the world's existing financial infrastructure? From what I've seen so far, I doubt it. For example, could it support the volume of the New York stock exchange, which currently experiences volumes in trillions of transactions per day?

Have you considered offering email-based amazon gift certificates for bitcoins? That way you wouldn't need to be a middle-man.