Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Tree-chains preliminary summary

From: Gavin Andresen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 08:45:00 -0400

On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 8:28 AM, Peter Todd <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Bitcoin doesn't scale. There's a lot of issues at hand here, but the
> most fundemental of them is that to create a block you need to update
> the state of the UTXO set, and the way Bitcoin is designed means that
> updating that state requires bandwidth equal to all the transaction
> volume to keep up with the changes to what set. Long story short, we get
> O(n^2) scaling, which is just plain infeasible.
>

We have a fundamental disagreement here.

If you go back and read Satoshi's original thoughts on scaling, it is clear
that he imagined tens of thousands of mining nodes and hundreds of millions
of lightweight SPV users.

Scaling is a problem if every person is a fully validating node; then,
indeed, you get an O(n^2) problem.  Which can be solved by extending some
tentative trust to your peers, but lets put all those possible solutions
aside.

Given tens of thousands of fully validating nodes, you get O(m*n), where m
is the number of fully validating peers and is a large constant (10s of
thousands).

We don't know how large m can or will be; we have only just started to
scale up.

"Bitcoin doesn't scale" is pure FUD. It might not scale in exactly the way
you want, but it WILL scale.

-- 
--
Gavin Andresen
Chief Scientist, Bitcoin Foundation
https://www.bitcoinfoundation.org/