Re: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin up.

By my two-second calculations, if about half of the worlds population were using Bitcoin and making 2 transactions per day, a flat average would be about 70,000 transactions per second. To account for peaks which one typically finds in network service use, better bump that up to about 250,000 transactions/sec. Then one must consider the potential for DOS attacks.

Contrast this with the .25 (aka 1/4) transactions/sec at the current high.

As currently implemented, Bitcoin scales until it fails then that's all she wrote. Ultimately I would be more comfortable with a solution which anticipated 'sharding' of some sort, and it seems logical and workable to combine this with a multitude of crypto-currencies each tuned to offer various advantages to their user base.

Of course the 'money changers' would have a hey-day in such an environment, but that fine. Probably open systems would develop to make things less costly for end-users. Some guy had a link to such a project a while ago. I think it was on Docmeister's Bitcoin-2 post.

actually the way i see it evolving is that Bitcoin would take the place of gold similar to the gold reserve system we had up until 1971.

That is the way I would like to see it evolving and at one time had hoped to see it evolving, but cannot see a mechanism for that to transpire at this point in time (thus my thought experiments on 'bakcoin'.)

Essentially Bitcoin is just to good as an exchange currency and there is no practical way to stop people from using it.

I think that there is a possibility that within the space of hours, the problem Bitcoin could face is how to discourage users rather than encourage them, and do so in a way that preserves the reputation of the solution. If such an event happened it would correspond to a failure of other currencies and would occur at the time when the Bitcoin solution was needed the most.