Are instantly confirmed decentralized transactions even theoretically possible? - page 3.

Excuse my layman's understanding of math but it seems like after cryptonote the only major milestone that is left to be reached in cryptocurrency (save all the weird quantum stuff) is making a blockchain that instantly confirms (and can scale indefinitely).

I suppose even the way I asked the question is flawed: an instantly confirming blockchain is easy - it's just that it would be incredibly susceptible to double spends and other attacks. I wonder if there is some beautiful mathematical proof by negative assumption that proves we will always be artificially limited by a network's confirmation time - and the shorter you cut the blocktime the less secure your network gets.

"Assume there was a cryptocurrency such that all transactions could be considered 'confirmed' as soon as they were received and the network had an incentive to spread them as quickly as possible to the other members of the network..."

The only way I can see to do it is to somehow set up a network of interconnected nodes and then incentivize propagation of spent transactions as fast as possible by awarding new coins to the MVP nodes who send the most data in a given time frame - I'm not even sure if you would be able to use a blockchain for this because there would be no way to keep all the nodes in sync.

One way I can see doing it (though ludacrously cumbersome) would be to assign each atomic unit its own "blockchain". I know this is a pretty abstract idea, but instead of there being 21 quadrillion atomic units, let's just say there's only five: A, B, C, D, & E. Each atomic unit has its own hash and mini-'chain'. If Alice has the private key to 'A' and wants to send it to Bob, she has to put it into a function that then overwrites the "owner" of 'A' to be Bob and securely delivers a new private key to him. Meanwhile Alice broadcasts this desire and all nodes on the network race to append the mini-blockchain 'A' with this new transaction information. In this way double-spends can be defended against because the network can just default to the earliest time-stamp detected (assuming each unit has only one owner), and if it detects a later timestamp it can be safely overwritten as a failed double spend attempt. Obviously different user addresses would need a reputation system for this to work: (if Alice has attempted a double-spend before or has a low transaction history, don't trust her) and there would need to be an incentive for nodes to be among the first to append each mini-blockchain with the new information. Perhaps the nodes are competing for the right to begin a new mini-blockchain for atomic unit 'F'.

What are your thoughts on this? Will we ever see an instantly confirming and infinitely scaling financial network?

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