Can you fix the "18 different people edited this" format?
"VISA handles on average around 2,000 transactions/sec, so call it a daily peak rate of 4,000/sec"
"Let's take 4,000 tps as starting goal."
"Let's assume an average rate of 2000tps, so just VISA."
"That means that you need to keep up with around 8 megabits/second of transaction data (2000tps * 512 bytes) / 1024 bytes in a kilobyte / 1024 kilobytes in a megabyte = 0.97 megabytes per second * 8 = 7.8 megabits/second.
This sort of bandwidth is already common for even residential connections today, and is certainly at the low end of what colocation providers would expect to provide you with."
If the network were to fail miserably, this is accurate. Otherwise everyone needs more than just a single downstream connection.
"As of October 2012 (block 203258) there have been 7,979,231 transactions, however the size of the unspent output set is less than 100MiB"
You need to back this up, because from what I recall estimates were between 70-80% of the current block chain's size, which, even today, is definitely not 100MB.
"Only a small number of archival nodes need to store the full chain going back to the genesis block. These nodes can be used to bootstrap new fully validating nodes from scratch but are otherwise unnecessary."
Yeah, unnecessary if there's a monopoly on mining and validating.
"VISA handles on average around 2,000 transactions/sec, so call it a daily peak rate of 4,000/sec"
"Let's take 4,000 tps as starting goal."
"Let's assume an average rate of 2000tps, so just VISA."
"That means that you need to keep up with around 8 megabits/second of transaction data (2000tps * 512 bytes) / 1024 bytes in a kilobyte / 1024 kilobytes in a megabyte = 0.97 megabytes per second * 8 = 7.8 megabits/second.
This sort of bandwidth is already common for even residential connections today, and is certainly at the low end of what colocation providers would expect to provide you with."
If the network were to fail miserably, this is accurate. Otherwise everyone needs more than just a single downstream connection.
"As of October 2012 (block 203258) there have been 7,979,231 transactions, however the size of the unspent output set is less than 100MiB"
You need to back this up, because from what I recall estimates were between 70-80% of the current block chain's size, which, even today, is definitely not 100MB.
"Only a small number of archival nodes need to store the full chain going back to the genesis block. These nodes can be used to bootstrap new fully validating nodes from scratch but are otherwise unnecessary."
Yeah, unnecessary if there's a monopoly on mining and validating.