Quote from: tvbcof on March 02, 2015, 08:29:09 PM

Quote from: onemorexmr on March 02, 2015, 04:42:10 PM

ever heard about blockchain pruning?
it certainly IS possible.

I heard about it when I read the whitepaper around 5 years ago. Since my first reaction upon grasping the basic concepts of Bitcoin was 'this thing won't scale', the idea of pruning was a 'selling point', but not a huge one because...

Of course since I don't believe in magic and voodoo, I knew that pruning could only go so far and that accounting had to be done. Giving this little hiccup a technical sounding name ('UTXO') was sufficient to get most of the ecosystem participants (or 'marks' if you will) to neglect any deeper analysis of this topic. This was fortunate because it made it possible to say that Bitcoin is nearly infinitely divisible while at the same time defining unspendable outputs (to small but way way over the current one satoshi theoretical limit) to resolve the problem. And, of course, the 'principle scientist' can spout off about the ability to make 1 BTC even more divisible with a little coding.

All that said (and I'm a natural skeptic) I had enough confidence...or something...in Bitcoin to take a decent sized position, a majority of which I hold today. I anticipated subordinate chains as the most tenable scaling mechanism from a very early time in my involvement, and with 'sidechains' that looks to be within grasp. If they can be available and leveraged before those who wish to 'embrace, extend, and extinguish' Bitcoin then there is still hope for the solution.

Quote from: onemorexmr on March 02, 2015, 04:42:10 PM

real problem is bandwith anyway - you cant escape that

True that, but with some significant nuances. In my analysis at least.

thank you for your well-thought and detailed response.

pruning:
i believe pruning is possible, because i can (on a theoretical level without diving deep into crypto or the protocol) imagine how bitcoin can work if a client which runs from day one only uses the UTXO and parses new blocks (and forgets them after that).

i think this narrows the problem down to bootstrapping.
as any client is able to verify the blockchain itself it is safe to download it from anywhere - as it WILL be checked - and could be thrown away afterwards.

there are many details to consider and of course it does add complexity. but i dont see any real showstopper.

sidechains:
i cant really comment on them as i dont know enough. but i am very skeptic there, because of mining:
- merged mining: needs an incentive, because pool will have a higher orphan rate
- pos: hmm maybe for micropayments but i wouldnt use it for anything else