Quote from: AlexZ on September 04, 2011, 07:15:33 AM

Am I the only one who thinks that the biggest BitCoin flaw is scalability?

When you have at least O(n2) algorithm you can be pretty sure it will bite you in the ass. Sooner, rather than later.

We have 800 Mb transaction database now. This means that people with slow or traffic-limited internet are out. Mobile devices are out. And it's what 20 000 users?

Yes, I know you can prune the chain, but to what extent?

When each transaction must be distributed to each member and you have, let's say, a million users, it's roughly one million network packets to send per one transaction.
Each user will do at least one transaction, so it will be one trillion packets!

And a million users? It's nothing. There are 300 million people in US alone.

You get to 100 million users and you will shutdown the Internet

10 quadrillion packets is a pretty big number. And with more users the number of transactions will grow. And I suspect the growth will be non-linear.

Bitcoin [...] doesn't scale beyond a small town population.

I'm telling you, that idea of an "Internet" will never work if you ever open it up to the masses. You will someday have hundreds of millions of people all thinking they can establish connections to each other at will, worldwide! We're not just talking about "E-mail" and "Usenet" nonsense, which are also impossible with too many users, just by themselves. You will wind up with people on radiotelephones actually expecting to be able to watch videotapes! It will never scale, can't be done. It is IMPOSSIBLE. It is an O(n^2) problem at least. Forget these silly fantasies. Just call me when you'd like more text files and I will bring them to you, clear across town, on another state-of-the-art 5.25 inch floppy diskette. Stay with what works, Alex. Stay with what works.