PLEASE READ POST BY MOBO DICK
According to
http://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size we're aproaching 6 gigabytes for the blockchain.
According to
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-and-netflix-dominate-americas-internet-traffic-111027/ Netflix is 34% of total...
I can't find numbers on exact transfer rate of the internet. But lets say ~1 exabyte per day (someone got a source to the real data?) so we're looking at netflix transfering 333,000 terabytes per day. This means that even if you had 55,500,000 bitcoiners downloading the entire blockchain every single day... you'd still be consuming less than netflix does on a daily basis.
For real numbers, number of tx * number of nodes * time = transfer rate of bitcoin network ... feel free to include an estimation of non-current blocks being transfered to out of sync clients.
The difficult seems to be that when bitcoin grows the potential for transactions also grows. The more people there are in the bitcoin economy the more there is to transact in the bitcoin economy.
It's related to the problems you get with interprocess communication in networked processing.
I can see that the number of transactions will rise at some exponential number compared to a linera rise in number of nodes.
So the ammounts of transactions wil grow faster than the ammounts of nodes.
If bitcoin becomes anything like important in society then you will pay for your groceries with it, you'll pay for gas with it, you'll pay for the ticket to dysneyland with it. So there will be a lot more transactions per user to be done.
And all these transactions also add up to the block chain, so everyone will need to get the blockchain which includes all the transactions of everyone else in the world.
I can easliy predict that the 6G of chain we have now will be meaningless once bitcoin represents some substantial part of the economy.
The 6Gig will be a daily download for every user at best. It won't take long before you will need to get a gig per minute to be up to date.
We all think the blockchain has been growing pretty fast lately, right?
Well, right now the size is related to about 55000 transactions daily. You need to get up to date with 55000 transactions per day.
Now imagine 1/10th of the world uses bitcoin to pay for their usual things.
We get 1/10th of 7x10^9 = 7x10^8 people participating.
Let's take an average of 5 transactions per user per day. You need to buy gas, you get an icecream, you pay the rent, etc.
(i'm just using some ballpark figures here to see where we get)
This gives us 1.4x10^9 transactions daily. 1.400.000.000 transactions per day.
That means the blockchain will grow about 25000 times faster than it does now.
Lets make an estimate of how much the blockchain grows right now.
In the last 1.2 months the blockchain grew by about a gigabyte.
On average that is about 0.0269 gigabyte per day. This gives us about 27.5 MB per day.
Ok, so now let's multiply this by our projected change in magnitude.
We get 27.5 x 25000 = 672 gigabyte per day !!
So in the situation where 1/10 of the world population does 5 bitcoin transactions per day on average everyone will need to download 672 gigabytes of new blockchain per day to keep up. If you didn't update for 2 days you'll need to download over 1TB . If you didn't touch your wallet for a month you'll be pumping 20TB to get up to date. And all this to be able to use bitcoin as a currency.
After only a year of hoarding blockchain everyone would have about 240TB of blockchain stored locally.
I think this will be problematic from an energy point of view even before the practical problems of storage become too devastating.
THANK YOU MOBO DICK
BULLS BITCOIN IS HORRIBLY FLAWED, AND THIS ISN'T EVEN INCULDING CONFIRMATIONS, MAINPULATION, NOTHING BACKING THE CURRENCY, PIPE DREAM ON
