Bitcoin userbase is growing 10 fold per year (hence the blockchain is growing 10 fold)
3 million users estimate now
30 million 1 year
300 million 2 years
3 billion 3 years
30 billion 4 years
Before 6 years there will not be enough people left in the world to become bitcoin users
Moore's law will outpace bitcoin once there are no more people left to use bitcoin.
Good point, however, people may start to use bitcoin more and more and more, still leading to some additional doubling of volumes
which could still be somewhat problematic. Perhaps even 10 folds.
Perhaps games will start to use bitcoin. I wouldn't recommend it because it would make bitcoin explode almost literally, but we are all powerless to stop it.
If such a scenerio happens we could be seeing a 100x fold, 1000x fold or even 1000000 fold pretty much overnight. That'll be the end of it quite quickly.
Huge ammounts of transactions happen in some games. It would probably dwarf bitcoin easily.
In the real world, maybe transactions don't happen that much, at least the usual stuff, like groceries, buying a pizza, filling the car tank gas, then again there are also the financial world and such... which could have high volumes... imagine all of that switching to bitcoin ?
Yes there are all sorts of extra factors - but there is a tipping point somewhere were either Moore's law takes over and the blockchain (relatively speaking) gets smaller and smaller, or the computing resources available to run bitcoin become too expensive and bitcoin fails. (Changing the hash algorithm is apperently possible, but are there any quantum safe hashing algorithms ? however all bitcoin accounts/addresses may be cracked and perhaps history changed).
Ultimately though the blockchain cannot continue to grow exponentially - at which point price performance of computing makes it easier and easier to run bitcoin (blockchain etc)
Perhaps quantum harddisks will come to exist, perhaps they can store much more information
Perhaps quantum computers can keep running bitcoin, or perhaps they will crack bitcoin and then it spectacularly fails
(apperently hash algorithm can be changed but are there any quantum safe hashing algorithms ? rsa/bitcoin accounts/addresses would be cracked/plundered ? or perhaps does that curve algorithm protect against quantum attacks ?
blockchain could probably be faked/recomputed though could be detected
)
Another good point you make, even with a distributed database, it cannot continue to grow exponentially, unless maybe quantum computers can handle exponential growth ?
When bitcoin runs out of harddisk space it will probaby stop functioning and it will simply crash/fail like you say.
However some people may still have some harddisk space so then perhaps it will continue to function for those lucky few
I think in reality big corporations like google, microsoft, facebook might take over and store the blockchain on their harddisks which they have plenty of.
Thus bitcoin might turn into a client/server system which pretty much make it the biggest fail ever
it will happily continue running, but it's original idea is d.e.a.d
LOL, but then the funny part is... even google/microsoft/facebook will have the exponential growth and eventually will have to give up ?
