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> I wanted to ask again here, directly to Bitcoin techies: How can BTC survive 100 years if no one can download the massive blockchain? Most residential IPs enf
by snikeris 9y ago
> I wanted to ask again here, directly to Bitcoin techies: How can BTC survive 100 years if no one can download the massive blockchain? Most residential IPs enforce a 1TB/mo cap. Much of the internet is also on slow connections (Australia).
Presumably in 100 years, your cap will be larger, and your internet will be faster.
- madeofpalk 9y agoHere's hoping!
- IkmoIkmo 9y agoShort story is that bitcoin is a ledger that keeps track of where coins go. So if I give you a coin, and you give it back, 1 trillion times, we have a huge database with two trillion transactions. But at the end of the day, nothing changed, I still have a coin and you don't, because you gave it back each time. Much of that data (i.e. 99.9999% of it, in this case) can be reliably thrown away for all practical intents and purposes. That's the gist of it. I'll spare you the technicalities (which I'm not intimately familiar with anymore myself, in any case), but the basic idea is that you don't need all data to run the network reliably. That, plus moore's law's equivalents for storage and networking, google them. They're not as strong as for CPU, but they're quite good anyway.
- s_dev 9y agoAs well -- only the last few blocks really needed rather than the whole chain.