Topic: do we need the blockchain? (Read 3417 times)

Yes we need the blockchain.  While not absolutely perfect, it's a completely elegant solution for forcing millions of self-serving, mutually antagonistic, error-prone humans to come together and agree on a mutual history.

Please don't feed the trolls.

Dear OP, with all due respect, I couldn't make it past your third item before immediately putting together this response.

Do some research and then come back to revise your post.  I suggest reading the white paper and searching through btctalk threads.  You have fundamental misunderstandings and an obvious lack of background on the available resources.

Take care!

your understanding.

Thats okay, we can help.

Not so, blocks don't need to generate coins, and a geometric decline is finite even if you don't go to zero (though bitcoin will go to zero).

Then use a lite client.

Transactions are "instant": the transaction is known to you as soon as you've heard of it. They become increasingly irreversible over time.

There is no reason I'm aware of why that must be so.

You can send txn over IRC if you want.

Mining exists to solve the double spending problem, you've not suggested an alternative to achieve that. What is the point of your message and why is it in the technical subforum?

Already. Follow the link in my signature.

Your proposed solution removes most of the strengths of Bitcoin. You start with a centralized distribution point. Why should whoever operates this decide who gets the coins? You want to remove the blockchain, but how then can we verify what balance you have? Someone has to keep track or I could just spend my coins many times over. This database has to either be centralized or decentralized.

In the centralized case, how exactly is it different from a government issueing money? Except that it won't be the gov't, but some company or organization. Same thing really, the currency can be inflated at will and the organization can decide to not include transactions it doesn't like.

If you store the ledger in a decentralized way, how are you going to resolve conflicts between different parties making different claims. If I claim that you sent me 10 coins and have my copy of the ledger to prove it, while you claim you didn't send the coins and have your ledger to prove it, who of us forged the ledger?

to avoid a double spend there needs to be a database to store information about who owns a particular amount of cents/satoshi/pennies. over time this database will grow..

so even if it was not a blockchain, a distributed ledger with transaction history would still grow.
imagine it this way:

take the US cent. each cent would have a digital signature to identify it, to make every cent accountable and able to be linked to a particular person. every 10 minutes 325,000 cents are created (equivalent to 25BTC at $130) and no more then this amount can be created due to each signature being designated to a particular coin in some fashion.
that is 325,000 new database entries every 10 minutes. and then when small amounts of them are moved between parties the searching the database for each signature, and swapping ownership in a way that is impossible to double spend or manipulate and then validate the completed transaction went seemlessly would cause huge delays.

knowing that in just 4 years 68,328,000,000 entries will need to be made just to identify every cent created WITHOUT even including a transaction ledger. imagine the database size.

lets say a cent needed a minimum of 12 digit hex code as its signature, to ensure no duplicate transactions (id recommend more though)

12bytes=819936000000bytes
=800718750KB(divide 1024 not 1000)
=781951.9MB(divide 1024 not 1000)
=763.6GB(divide 1024 not 1000)

this is the size of a database ONLY storing data of fresh made coins over a 4 year period, equivelent to making 25x$130 every 10 minutes.

no transactions...
now imagine it had to be 8 decimals that needed to be accountable...

satoshi nakamoto has actually made a brilliant way to secure double spending, make every satoshi accountable and ensure that manipulation cant happen... at a far far far less storage requirement then a FIAT system would need

I've noticed a few flaws with the blockchain model.
Among those are.

1.You need to create new blocks in order to make transactions, making it impossible for the crypto currency to ever be completely finite.
2.You need to download the blockchain every time you fire up the wallet which becomes increasingly heavier with time
3.You need miners to protect the blockchain
4.All your transactions are saved on the blockchain
5.Transaction time is dependant on the creation of new blocks

Even the argument that it makes things more decentralized doesn't hold up since we all know mining becomes more centralized with time anyways.

Now I'm not saying this will affect bitcoins in any major way, but I think if someone were to come up with another cryptocurrency in the future they should do away with the concept of blockchain altogether.

Said currency should
1.start off centralised
2.given away to make it more decentralised.
3.make the transactions work through another method like IRC

This would make transactions instant, anonymous and there wouldn't be a need for miners.

Sort of like ripple I guess.

Am I right or am I wrong?