Quote from: TopSoil on July 13, 2010, 07:43:01 PM

1) Well even if you are right and the system can forget about old transactions, it still is broadcasting all current transactions to all nodes which doesn't scale. And nodes will need to keep collecting blocks forever which also doesn't scale.

That is a good point, one I didn't think about. So, let me think out loud here. There are a possible 21 million coins. Every time a block is generated by someone, they earn 50 coins. Right now, I see 66,618 blocks have been generated since the beginning. So that's 66618 x 50 = 3,330,900 coins so far. To reach 21 million, we need to reach 21,000,000 / 50 = 420,000 blocks. 66,618 blocks take up about 56 megabytes of hard disk space. So, perhaps 420,000 blocks (if every single coin is created) would take up about 420000 x 56 / 66618 = 353 megabytes of hard disk space.

The rest would be transaction history to make sure the owners are valid and older transactions are pruned after a while, so perhaps at full scale, this application could eat up as much as 1GB of hard disk space. So, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but even at full scale, the clients would need about 1GB of hard disk space to contain a fully generated coin network?

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2) Yes I know it is p2p that is why you have to worry about how the network stays connected and not just assume everyone will be connected. There are issues like islanding that you have to worry about if you remove a central point like the irc channel is now. This issue is more minor because this problem has been solved before and you don't have to change the way the currency system works to fix it later. I only mention it because I think the solution to 1 will also help here.

From what I read in the release notes, the IRC is just a bootstrap, the new version can work around IRC failure as it has an alternative (but slower) ways to sync up the first time users to the network.

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3) I know the number is really 21million*10^8 or whatever. But that is still fixed and the size of the bitcoin economy (hopefully) isn't fixed. The idea is that it will grow right? So that means that the value of bitcoins will have to change over time which isn't ideal. A currency that has 0 inflation/deflation is the most ideal right?

Well, imagine if you will, the US and our national gross. It's somewhere in the multi-trillions last I heard. So, if everything had to be converted to dollars, that would be a trillion dollars in circulation (ignore how a complex system like a countries currency, this is way over simplifying). No imagine all of that was to be transfered into Bit Coins? Well, there are only 21 million Bit Coins, so a 1 to 1 conversion is out of the question. Basically it would have to be scaled back to the decimal points (probably 4 places) to fit all of that in. That still leaves 4 more decimal places in which any economy working in the Quadrillion range is probably out of scope of any country in the world (or all countries combined really)

So, if you don't think of a 1 to 1 conversion for Bit Coins, because even I want to think of Bit Coins as dollars for example. But it isn't. It is it's own currency within itself whose value is only dependent on the people that use it and what value they give it. It's like that for any currency really, the only difference is, instead of the bank or government in XYZ country being the one who controls how it's created and distributed, WE *all* control how it's created and distributed.

We are *minting* the coin (through CPU cycles to generate the encryption hashes) and at the same time using it for trade and value. The only difference is, this isn't a USA currency or a Swedish currency, it's all completely electronic. The bank, the teller, the minting; is all of us at the same time. Basically, all of our clients have agreed upon certain rules to follow and as long as each client follows those rules, it can participate. Any client that doesn't (through hacking, cheating, etc.) is basically ignored by the rest. It's like playing a game of soccer where you have two teams competing and one guy just up and grabs the ball, runs down to the other side and throws the ball in. Dances up and down that he scored a point. Well, everyone else will just ignore him and his point, he wasn't playing by the set rules. Grin