(context post by rodin)
Was the original question ever answered? Can the clients handle 35000 transactions per block? What about 100000? What is the bytesize of a transaction in the block? How much bandwidth is needed for the network to push these around in 10 minutes?
I am convinced that bandwidth, disk space, and computation time necessary to distribute and “finalize” a transaction will be prohibitively expensive for micro-payments. Consider for a second that the current banking industry is unable to provide a reasonable micropayment solution that does not involve depositing a reasonable sum and only allowing a withdraw after a reasonable sum has been accumulated.
Besides, 10 minutes is too long to verify that payment is good. It needs to be as fast as swiping a credit card is today.
Thus we need bit-banks that allow instant transfers among members and peer banks. Anyone can open a bit-bank but the system would, by necessity operate on some level of trust. Transfers in and out of the banks and peer-to-peer would still be possible but will be more costly. Thus, a bit bank could make money by enabling transfers cheaper and faster than the swarm with the added risk of trusting the bank. A bank has to maintain trust to make money.
The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms. The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don’t generate.
Quote from: bytemaster on July 28, 2010, 08:59:42 PM
Besides, 10 minutes is too long to verify that payment is good. It needs to be as fast as swiping a credit card is today.
See the snack machine thread, I outline how a payment processor could verify payments well enough, actually really well (much lower fraud rate than credit cards), in something like 10 seconds or less. If you don’t believe me or don’t get it, I don’t have time to try to convince you, sorry. topic 423