Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Limitations of Blockchain. What are they?
by
nc50lc
on 20/02/2018, 11:02:54 UTC
Bitcoin's solid security brought by the cryptography-based (public ledger) system known as the Blockchain have a lot of limitations
but not one of these (bold and colored):
There are many limitation of blockchains like: Complexity, Network size, Transaction costs, network speed, Human error, Unavoidable security flaw and  Politics. It has made cryptography more mainstream, but the highly specialized industry is chock-full of jargon. Thankfully, there are several efforts at providing glossaries and indexes that are thorough and easy to understand.
Seriously, how can an automated public ledger produce human errors? What you wrote were typical human handling errors that are not exclusive and caused by the blockchain.

Anyways, things that I'm noticing are:
[1] The Full Node's increasing file size, the current 145GB+ of Data may be easy to store in any HDD/SSD (not even mentioning the synchronization speed), but somewhere in the future it can grow up to 1TB that can be inaccessible for some.
This can lead to standard full node users to use 3rd party clients, nodes could be exclusively owned by huge groups or companies due to its inaccessible size, might result in less nodes, more centralization.
There are couple of possible solutions to this, in the future, developers might find a solution to this even before the full node reach that level.
Let's say, start by not increasing the block size.

[2] The 51% attack. Today's hashing power might be phenominal, even with the unethical mining system we have now known as pools, a 51% attack is nearly impossible.
But when the 21m BTC supply was mined, miners will surely shift to a more mining-profitable coin that can lead to a lower Hashing power.
With that, one of those huge pools can easily gain more than half of the mining operation, it's up to them whether they use that advantage to help or destroy btc, things will differ depending on our view of digital currencies at that time.

It's easy to assume that new technologies can pave a road to a better future, yes it can, but all had gone to a phase that required us to deal with its own limitations.