[sarahj]

I remember reading about Bitcoin a couple of years ago and expressing disbelief that many of the major advantages being heralded were little more than fantasy, these were:

* Micro-transactions.

* Replacing practically everything related to money in developing countries.

From this thread it is clear that many of those dreams are still very much dreams - the ever growing energy and resource requirements to participate significantly in the network is staggering, the amount of storage required for the blockchain is a burden to even tech-aware users (unless of course one would want to trust a third party...), and now it would seem that there are minimum bandwidth requirements which sit outside what is possible in even modest parts of the USA - impossible to achieve in places where the main link to the internet is a satellite.

If I was feeling particularly optimistic I would say that Bitcoin has been shown to be unscalable in it's current form. Further, the network itself tends towards centralization because of the ever growing storage, processing and bandwidth requirements.

I look forward to seeing where the future of crypocurrencies leads us- there is so much promise.

[brighton36]

You wouldn't believe how clunky the Internet was when it first started. This stress test is fairly minor compared to the problems bitcoin had in 2011 and 2012. With time, the blockchain will improve. Just like the Internet. You should look into the Lightning Network paper, there's no shortages of solutions in bitcoin. Meanwhile, traditional financial platforms have been stagnant for decades.

[aliakhtar]

In 2000, about 5-6 years after the internet was easily available to public, I had a dial up connection, email, IM, a web browser, etc in the middle-of-nowhere town in Pakistan where I was born. Bitcoin has been out for close to 6-7 years and does not even come close to the maturity / adoption of internet.

[kaoD]

The internet got better as time went by. The blockchain is getting worse.

[colordrops]

I've seen this argument several times. The flaw with it though is that it confuses growing resource needs with centralization. Even if a large percentage of people are no longer capable of easily hosting a full node, the benefits of decentralization are there. The resources required are not insane, so "normal" people (read: not power elite) are capable of running a node, and so there is still enough decentralization so that no entity can corrupt the blockchain. Besides that, the rate of transaction growth is slower than growth in bandwidth and disk space costs, so things will likely get better.

[juliangregorian]

> Even if a large percentage of people are no longer capable of easily hosting a full node, the benefits of decentralization are there.

How exactly? If you don't host a full node, you can only participate by going through someone who does.

> The resources required are not insane, so "normal" people (read: not power elite) are capable of running a node

The resources are formidable, and those in developing economies (except for the "power elite") have no hope of running a node.

> there is still enough decentralization so that no entity can corrupt the blockchain

Except that mining syndicates control huge swaths of the blockchain and it would only take the collusion of a few to control an absolute majority.

> the rate of transaction growth is slower than growth in bandwidth and disk space costs, so things will likely get better

Please explain the math on this. My understanding of network effects means that the problem will probably only get worse.

[davidgerard]

> The flaw with it though is that it confuses growing resource needs with centralization.

And yet, we observe centralisation.