1m$ is definitely an understimate for a life of sailing the sea on a yatch. You would need a solid 10+ for that.
As for the people that got legit rich, they were extremely lucky, thats all. They bought tons of BTC for peanuts in 2009, and the ones that bought less (but still a decent amount) hold by accident because they forgot about BTC for 3 years and sold when they heard about it again on the news as the big pump happened. It's being at the right time doing the right thing. I wish we could all become rich with BTC at this point, but we would need BTC to take the lead as the #1 electronic payment method. For this, the blocksize problem is a big problem, and im not sure if Bitcoin will ever be able to achieve that technically, someone correct me if im wrong.
Did satoshi design Bitcoin in a way that it couldn't deal with tons of transactions per second, or it was a design flaw?
Did satoshi design Bitcoin in a way that it couldn't deal with tons of transactions per second, or it was a design flaw?
I wouldn't call it a flaw, more a reflection of the limits of technology. Hard drives and RAM are limited, bandwidth is limited, blocks and the blockchain can only be so large before Bitcoin starts choking.
You can increase the transaction capacity but it requires more investment in the mining equipment, which is just what this 20 MB fork civil war and fears of centralization is about. I'm brainstorming away on a pet project that, if I can ever get a conceptual model working, would involve the use of a customized cryptocurrency. But it requires dramatically higher transaction capacity than bitcoin (if it simply replaced what we are doing today globally, I'd need to be able to maintain 1,000,000+ transactions/second), and I've not found a means to cope with this yet. If anyone has any ideas on that, drop me a line...
Satoshi intended for Bitcoin to scale according to its growth. He knew that if Bitcoin is to ever succeed as a serious currency used for payments then the maximum block size would need to be much larger than it is today because obviously, you can't fit tons of transactions in <1 MB blocks. His comment about how sending 2 HD movies over the Internet would seem trivial by the time Bitcoin reaches this size suggests that he believes the network should be able to accommodate the increasing bandwidth requirements of Bitcoin due to the trend of increasing network connection speeds (Nielson's Law):
Long before the network gets anywhere near as large as that, it would be safe for users to use Simplified Payment Verification (section eight) to check for double spending, which only requires having the chain of block headers, or about 12KB per day. Only people trying to create new coins would need to run network nodes. At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with that one node.
The bandwidth might not be as prohibitive as you think. A typical transaction would be about 400 bytes (ECC is nicely compact). Each transaction has to be broadcast twice, so lets say 1KB per transaction. Visa processed 37 billion transactions in FY2008, or an average of 100 million transactions per day. That many transactions would take 100GB of bandwidth, or the size of 12 DVD or 2 HD quality movies, or about $18 worth of bandwidth at current prices.
If the network were to get that big, it would take several years, and by then, sending 2 HD movies over the Internet would probably not seem like a big deal.
Link:
http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09964.htmlI didn't cash out at $1000. Nobody was talking about cashing out at that time (at least that I know of). We thought that it was going up from there and so I was still buying more - not a lot, but still buying. People nowadays all talk about "should have" and stuff, but that wasn't the general feel at the time.
Then when it went down, there was no way I was going to dump the coin, because I know it will go back up again and further.
That being said I use the Bitcoin I have, I don't hodl all of it. I have a good amount in cold storage, but I've been buying and spending it like I would fiat.
I guess in retrospect it seems pretty obvious that those were temporary bubbles and that the price was unsustainable. Interesting that it wasn't really apparent back then. If the price ever shoots up by >5x in one day, I'll definitely be selling half of my coins.
