Top ten technical issues facing BTC

[creekbore]

Saw an interview with Greg Maxwell shortly after the malleability issue broke and he (to paraphrase) said he had known of the issue for some time and wouldn't have put it in the top ten of issues facing BTC from a technical PoV.

Which begs the question: what are those top ten issues?

EDIT: Just noticed Greg mods this forum...so that's good    Perhaps he could post the list as he sees it.

[e4xit]

Hi Glen! 

[phelix]

Good question but maybe it should wait a couple of days until the malleability issue is fixed.

Note: His name is Greg/Gregory.

[creekbore]

Good question but maybe it should wait a couple of days until the malleability issue is fixed.

Note: His name is Greg/Gregory.

Sincere apologies...OP edited. 

[nmersulypnem]

I would think one of the biggest is the transaction (TPS) limit.  I mean people gloss over the fact that Bitcoin simply *cannot* be used to process more than 5-10 transactions per second and with a processing time of 10-15 minutes.  They claim that payment processors like Coinbase and bitpay can act as intermediaries, but they fail to realize that by using those, you've just replaced one evil (Visa, Paypal) with another, and negated a huge portion of the value-add that people are expecting Bitcoin to fulfill (which I believe also accounts for a substantial portion of the price).

What's more infuriating is that since key members of the bitcoin foundation are involved in those ventures - this limitation isn't even being seriously addressed (except for the minor blocksize increase in the next version - which is still not nearly sufficient).

There are solutions - like what Ethereum is trying by using a block tree, rather than a simple chain - but someone else can probably explain that better.

[maaku]

What's more infuriating is that since key members of the bitcoin foundation are involved in those ventures - this limitation isn't even being seriously addressed (except for the minor blocksize increase in the next version - which is still not nearly sufficient).

Not all developers are working for the foundation or these companies.

[tacotime]

There are solutions - like what Ethereum is trying by using a block tree, rather than a simple chain - but someone else can probably explain that better.

I don't think the blocktree in Ethereum's configuration really addresses this, as the block times are still one minute (or at least, were when I last talk to Vitalik).  Aside from that, extremely fast blocktree implementations (as in the GHOST paper) still requires tx to traverse the network among different nodes and will probably hit bandwidth problems comparable to Bitcoin, if not worse because very large numbers of blocks containing the same tx will be hitting the network at nearly the same time any given second.  It's more a solution to the problem of insecurity introduced by large blocks on a slow network.

[phoenox]

Another issue related to transaction speed is the blockchain bloat.  Once blockchain pruning has been implemented then it will be more practical to increase the transactions per block.

One thing that I see as a major issue is the centrilization of mining.  The proof of work mining system as implemented creates an advantage for economies of scale.  To be a profitable bitcoin miner it is helpfull(necessary?) to have a huge asic farm.  It would be preferable if mining was done as part of the decentrilized network, but it seems to be headed towards a situation where only a few big players will be able to mine.  Then there will be nothing stopping these few players from colluding to controll the network.