I recently spearheaded the launch of a 5-year / $3-million dollar project called the Gigablock Testnet Initiative. The goals of the project are to do scaling R&D so that bitcoin can scale to bank the billions of unbanked, facilitated low-friction payments between anyone, and .... well simply be better money.
Why limit the block size to 1GB? Lets make it 1000GB each block, You can then scale bitcoin to bank trillions of unbanked from the entire Milky Way! Or if we make the block size limit to 1000TB then we can scale bitcoin to bank trillions of unbanked from all the nearby galaxies. But then who will host the blockchain? Jesus, is that you?
The eventual solution is to not care how big blocks get.
When the demand arrives (which will be decades from now), 10 GB and even 100 GB blocks will be feasible. This is fairly straightforward engineering.
But for now, our research shows that the throughput capacity of a global network of bitcoin nodes is limited to about 100 transactions per second (30x times the current throughput), due to the single-threaded mempool code path of Satoshi-derived clients. After Andrew Stone's parallelization of mempool, the capacity was increased to about 500 transactions per second (150x the current throughput). At this point, block propagation becomes the bottleneck. There is still lots of work to be done.
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I realize that you're being sarcastic, but you couldn't actually scale bitcoin to a galactic payment system due to speed-of-light constraints***.
Happily, since all our world is reachable by an electromagnetic signal in less than 100 ms, the actual bitcoin network doesn't have this physical scaling limitation.On the highlighted part, translation: "we just need to ignore the Laws of physics and it will work!"
I smell male cow fecal matter.
***Actually, you can do a galactic payment system. Speed of light is only a limit for particle function, gravity has to/is clearly works near instantly through the galaxy, otherwise it would fall apart. Quantum entanglement already showed that state information (longitudional wave function) propagates faster than the light of speed (which is not a constant, depends on the medium it travels through).