Quote from: MemoryDealers on August 04, 2011, 09:35:05 AM

... Please critique the above.

I wish I could be this optimistic. In action, I am hopeful; I'm still gung ho about mining, partially because I've invested about $3000 in my rig, not to mention all the electricity I've spent on mining.

However, I am not quite so optimistic about the real future of the Bitcoin's adoption as a currency for everyday use in all the scenarios where today we use fiat currencies. The major reason for my doubt is with the infrastructure requirements. Even now, in what we consider Bitcoin's infancy, joining the P2P network requires the download of a rather long block chain. And, every client that wants to make transactions has to continue to constantly download all the data about every transaction that occurs. That may not take much bandwidth today, where most of the transactions are just a few thousand trades per day. Expand that to a commercial payment system where Billions of people around the world are using Bitcoins to buy everything from a house to a pack of gum at the gas station, and you have a serious bandwidth problem. When obviously you'll want your smartphone to be holding your everyday wallet, no device short of a multi-terabyte workstation hooked up to an OC-3 will be able to keep up with the bandwidth and burgeoning size of that transaction list. Even at today's rate, I doubt anyone's smartphone battery could last the day running a Bitcoin client.

Unless some revolutionary changes are made to the entire system, I'm afraid this problem will quickly kill the Bitcoin as a real means of value exchange.

I would love to hear about a solution to this problem because I sincerely want to see the Bitcoin succeed.