Quote from: TerraHertz on June 21, 2011, 06:51:52 AM

Wait, what? A virtual monetary system in which the data volume that must be processed to maintain system functionality grows perpetually?

Seriously?

I'm new here, so I expect I'm missing some stupid detail which shows it isn't so. Hopefully. Because otherwise the entire scheme is insane.

I'm kind of thinking the same thing. Even with the possibility of 'lite' or 'chain-less' clients, the exponential growth of data required just to sustain day-to-day transactions seems infeasible.

Unmitigated commented that the increasing difficulty is part of the genius of Bitcoin, but I have to disagree. It may be effective at creating a predictable rate of money creation, but once all Bitcoins have been generated and (in the ideal scenario) the whole world is using Bitcoins for day-to-day transactions, it becomes a serious problem, since the space required to store the entire chain grows without bounds. Say for example you wanted to move a single coin that has already been moved 3,500,000 times. That's a pretty significant chain to verify, even for a large GPU-based data center!

TL;DR: There may be something I don't understand, but it seems like block/chain growth in size and difficulty will eat up all computing resources thrown at it (I'm thinking years down the road when all coins have been generated).

Edit: idea clarification

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