Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: rpietila Altcoin Observer
by
smooth
on 02/09/2014, 03:50:54 UTC
Bandwidth scales slower than Moore's law but is not in danger of ending:

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/law-of-bandwidth/

Neither can scale fast enough so XMR to reach 10 million users in 3 years, because XMR would need to scale 10^3 in 3 years.

This doesn't follow because it would assume that XMR is currently maxed out on bandwidth or Moore's Law considerations, which is false.

Terabit bandwidth will be available to fixed locations in that time-frame.  Mobile bandwidth isn't really an issue, because thin clients will be used for mobile, exclusively, for the foreseeable future.  I just don't see bandwidth as an issue for XMR, ever.  For some users, always, but for network strength and integrity, as well as capacity?  No.  Lower consumption would aid in decentralization, but unless your hard requirement is to maximize decentralization (as I suspect it is for AnonyMint) it's not a problem.

I mis-spoke when I suggested flash was necessary to the blockchain.  Magnetic storage is quite cheap and adequate for full nodes, and will already scale 10^3.

Even if his requirement is for maximized decentralization his argument is still false. PCs are not maxed out on XMR today. Even some smartphones could almost certainly run XMR today fairly well. (I'm running it on a nettop that is smartphone-class, and it is nowhere near maxed out.)

That is because as far I know you are not close to maximizing transactions (and Peter R showed that market cap is correlated to the square of an increase in a proxy for txs as a proxy for user adoption), and as far as I know in fact proactively discouraged them recently by raising tx fees to deal with a DoS attack. The paradigm appears to be broken to me.

I'm not sure in what sense you mean "maximizing transactions." Yes there is an observed correlation, but I don't believe that increasing junk transactions would in and of itself increase market cap.

As far as the recent fee increase, that is rather interesting (not sure whether relevant to your point or not, assuming you have one). By increasing the fee by a factor of 20 we decreased transactions by about 28% (ignoring the period of obvious abuse) as can be viewed here: http://monerochain.info/charts/transactions

I'm not sure whether this elasticity has been measured before, and I have no interpretation to offer. Just putting it out there.

There will be another interesting experiment when we change the fees to per-kb.