Could a blockchain* be invented that deals with balances and not coins? If you don't have to track coins you can only update the newest balances. That would probably scale because all you have to do is update new balances in every network "refresh" when money movement took place - and if you have, say, 1bn accounts, you'll still have 1bn accounts after 10 days of transactions - only the balances will be different in them. So, practically, it doesn't get more bloated. I can consider several problems but are they insurmountable?
* It doesn't need to be a blockchain per se. It could well be something like a paypal-type database but decentralized/distributed that has network consensus on what the balances are.
Sorry No, not in anything that will be DECENTRALIZED. I went through all these sort of design diversions and found flaws in all of them.
I appreciate of course that everyone is still interested in finding solutions. We all know we need a solution. But if there is no solution, we have to accept the laws of physics. Please see
the other thread I started for more detailed discussion on ideas and what I (and others) think works and doesn't work.
If we had a 99.9% compression algorithm*, that is able to fold data again and again, reducing a 2mb file to 4kb, but requires a CPU tradeoff for all this folding/unfolding, would that work for scaling?
*
http://www.theserverside.com/feature/Has-a-New-York-startup-achieved-a-99-compression-rateVideo has a lot of redundant data because of high frame rates and many objects are static or just displaced with rotation, which can perhaps be modeled in 3D.
But even if we can compress the block chain to nothing, that doesn't really solve the fundamental problems such as:
Complex problems require breaking them down and tackling the issues one by one. Surely we can't expect one solution for one problem to fit all problems.
If, say, scaling can be solved by compression, and other aspects of crypto still remain problematic, then you just try to find the corresponding solutions to the remaining problems.
From what I've read over the years, it seems like compression, and especially very large compression ratios, like 99.9%+, are of extremely high government interest, similar to encryption. Apparently taking 1GB and making it 10KB is something of extremely strategic value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Sloothttp://www.endlesscompression.com/ (around the middle of the page, there are various patents or stories of various inventors / programmers etc)
The fact that some of it concerns video is not very important because, from what I understand, these are not techniques concerned with removing redundant repetitions of same color that isn't changing in the next frame. It's more like a totally different approach. If you can fit GB movies in 10kb, for example, then you can do the same with text, because text, too, can be displayed as a movie stream. A movie at 30fps is still 108.000 pictures per hour, and you can fit
a lot of text (like blockchain data) in those pictures, especially in HD or 4k.
And there are some other compression schemes I've read about, where data is compressed again and again, not based on repeating patterns (like a book that says 1000 times the word "and" - which can be replaced by a single symbol - a method which has a limit on savings) but rather pre-arranged tables of data sequences that act like keys. So you shave a few % each round and then repackage, repackage, repackage etc, until you get to a very small size.
A good intellect that would like to tackle the issue of near-100% compression and make it available to the masses could make a global breakthrough far greater than cryptocurrency or even the web, but, incidentally, would also help cryptocurrency to scale.