Right, once we reach the 1 trillion unspent transactions in a decade or 3. And all advances in storage technology will stop from today forward.
Looks you are completely theoretical, while I'm practical.
With your optimism paypal can run their processing on raspberry PI
1 trillion? And PC will survive? LOL.
No, you're being theoretical too. There is currently no problem, and you are imagining usage levels that will take decades to arrive. I'm being much more practical than you about adoption rate, yet somehow I'm more bullish
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No problem? You fokin kidding me? If I use Bitcoin for payments once a week or two, and need to wait hours for sync each time I launch client - its not a problem? My PC hangs for that time - its not a problem?
Don't offer me crunch! Imagine I am regular stupid user - not Satan slave. Is it not a problem? Where is log(n) in this formula? Clever blind bulls.
You sound like an IT guy with no understanding of the underlying algorithms and methodologies. What do you think people did back when each bit of RAM was literally a magnetic torus hand-threaded with wires and data was stored in a big linear magnetic tape that took minutes to "seek" to the proper position? I didn't live it but have read about it. There are clever algorithms (btree being one) that minimize uncached key lookup time. Holding all the database keys in RAM is a very new technique only recently made possible due to how cheap RAM has gotten. Also, all unspent txn don't need to be held. Lots of coins out there don't move at all (~90%) which is why some people think a lot of hoarding is going on. So the RAM need only cache the acts/txns that are "in play".
And if bitcoin becomes incrediably popular, imagine a network that dynamically creates new blockchains among commonly-transacting user groups (regional, for example) spends BTC from the main blockchain into this new chain and then after a few months (or whatever) merges the chain back. This technique that would make it so that the main blockchain does not see every microtransaction in the entire world, and subchains could have either smaller or longer settling times depending on the requirements for that chain. Sure it would take a lot of effort to implement. No point doing it until there really is a problem with the system as it exists today.