Re: What are the major hurdles you feel BitCoin faces to mainstream acceptance?
I agree with the various problem already debated. I think there are also some other concerns (or rather, some questions), not just for mainstream acceptance but also for "computer people" acceptance. Maybe they are trivial and I shouldn't worry about those, but still I didn't find any crystal-clear answer to those:
1)
2) Is there someone or a few people controlling the core of the network? If no, then why does it seem so hard to set up a test network (I think I read about that in some developer/debugging thread)? If yes, who? and how do we know this won't stop running at some point?
NB: I know every Bitcoin ad I see says "no central authority", but they always forget to explain (even briefly) how it is possible to achieve this...
3) As far as I understood: blocks and all transactions are stored in the blockchain, which is duplicated on all clients. What happens when/if there's a mass adoption and, say, 100M transactions a day (yeah, not likely to happen any time soon, but that's what they said about year 2000 when they were happily storing dates in 2 digits in the 1980s). More generally, will that thing scale (very) well?
Sorry again if this looks like newbie questions (but hey that's the newbie section after all
), but I really think clear answers to those may help to convince more tech-aware people to try BTC (or not ^^), which is a first step before going for mainstream acceptance.
1)
Who or what resets the mining difficulty?
Looks like I'm not the only wondering this. As far as I understood the difficulty is adjusted given the hashrate power of the network, so adjusting it needs a measure of blockcount (every client has it, afaik) and time (potentially different from a client to another - needs some kind of a central authority - who is this?)2) Is there someone or a few people controlling the core of the network? If no, then why does it seem so hard to set up a test network (I think I read about that in some developer/debugging thread)? If yes, who? and how do we know this won't stop running at some point?
NB: I know every Bitcoin ad I see says "no central authority", but they always forget to explain (even briefly) how it is possible to achieve this...
3) As far as I understood: blocks and all transactions are stored in the blockchain, which is duplicated on all clients. What happens when/if there's a mass adoption and, say, 100M transactions a day (yeah, not likely to happen any time soon, but that's what they said about year 2000 when they were happily storing dates in 2 digits in the 1980s). More generally, will that thing scale (very) well?
Sorry again if this looks like newbie questions (but hey that's the newbie section after all
), but I really think clear answers to those may help to convince more tech-aware people to try BTC (or not ^^), which is a first step before going for mainstream acceptance.