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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: TobagoJack who wrote (137050)12/10/2017 2:52:34 AM
From: Elroy Jetson  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 217617
 
The problem is it's not oen node with "a super computer" it's everyone's computer participating in Bitcoin - and transactions will always have to compete for computer time with "mining" so transaction costs will remain high no matter how fast everyone's computer gets.

The extremely inefficient transaction problem can be solved by banks like Coinbank or Mt Gox, but only by transferring ownership of your "coins" to Coinbank or Mt Gox and letting them keep ledgers of who now owns what - which is not reflected in the blockchains.

But this introduces the problem of trusting a bank - and depositors in Mt Gox lost nearly everything they had on deposit and no one really knows where it went. So you really get a choice of one or the other, an alleged currency which you can conveniently use for payment by relying on uninsured and unregulated banks or an alleged currency where transactions are very slow and very costly but your ownership is written into the currency.

But we now know this "currency" can contain embedded malware placed by those who are fairly sophisticated - a currency which can alter your data or even make your currency cease to exist. At a point in the future, this will all seem so obvious a child could have pointed out the flaws.



To: TobagoJack who wrote (137050)12/11/2017 9:29:51 AM
From: Horgad  Respond to of 217617
 
Scalability issues are typically in most new computer programs...it is expensive to think ahead and plan for scalability up front. So many projects go with the philosophy "we will deal with that problem when/if it comes up and if it happens, we will be grateful that we have that problem". IE few spend the bucks to build something that will continue to work if it becomes widely successful/popular. Instead you wait to see if your program becomes successful/popular and then fix it. Basically by doing this you are limiting your initial investment and the associated risk.

So, scalability issues shouldn't be what takes Bitcoin down. It is just a hiccup with many possible solutions. Of course, since there is not one group that specifically owns the code or owns the decision on which direction to take the code, the developer community is struggling to come to an agreement on which solution to pursue. Many don't want the code to fundamentally change and want to solve the issue by throwing more hardware at it...like as you mentioned some kind of super computing network. Others want to continually trim the block chains down always discarding the oldest transactions. And some want to complete transactions based on a partial confirmation of the blockchain and then send the transaction off to be archived, slowly, completely at some super computer's leisure. And who knows what other solutions there are...