Internet speeds are irrelevant, as they increase rapidly as data usage increases. The capacity is not even remotely near its maximum (last I checked 100~1000 GBit for consumers were possible but simply not sensible right now), even if you exclude all the satellites that are being launched over the coming years.
Data plans irrelevant as most countries don't have "data plans" for home use and offer unlimited bandwidth instead.
Storage is irrelevant as well. Even 4 TB SSDs only cost a few hundred bucks these days. By the time storage became an issue we'll have 50-100 TB hard drives for a couple hundred dollars.
RAM seems the only sensible bottleneck if your numbers are accurate. $6 per GB currently and I haven't seen RAM size increase as much as other hardware. But that seems to be mostly because of a lack of utility rather than technical implausibility.
I also fail to see how your highway analogy is supposed to hold. Highways are inherently limited by physical space. Hardware inherently works in a different way. If we had arbitrary amounts of space that we could build on economically we'd have no problem with building even a personal lane for every single human in the world. And with hardware we actually do. It takes sometime to develop and scale, but so far there's no end in sight to how much data we can get from any one point on earth to any other.
I have no idea about the implications on mining and centralization though.
As far as a "real game changer" is concerned. That's already Bitcoin. It solves one of humanity's biggest issues. Banks fucking around and screwing the entire population. For a new "real game changer" to appear we would first require a new "real problem".
And Bitcoin hasn't even been around long enough to really get rid of the issues that come with banking, privatized profits, socialized losses, as well as the fiat toilet paper printing press.
It'll probably take a few decades until we can really identify new serious problems and have people give enough of a shit about them for some to try and someone to actually succeed in solving them as well as people actually jumping ship.
yes totally agree with you on your last point....
The highway analogy was not about space to build the highway, but rather it doesn't matter how many lanes are built, it will still eventually get to the same outcome as a 1 lane highway. You will still end up with traffic congestion, nothing has been solved. I was merely trying to associate with the fact bitcoin developers was not concerned with building more lanes, ie increase block size, but focusing on alternate transport methods or alternate transport habits. ie layer 2 scaling.
There also comes to a point where you may never be able to run full node from scratch. Based on a 30sec a 1MB validation time and i have read somewhere that it may be quadratically longer the bigger the block. will try and find the whitepaper on that one, but for arguments sake i used a linear model. You will be validating previous blocks and never catching up.
Just to confirm the 30sec theory, i'd shutdown my Bitcoin Node, was 8 blocks behind, fired it back up and it took about 5mins to catch up 10 blocks, two blocks was found while validating/catching up.
Maybe in developed countries the internet is more reliable, but what about us third world internet countries, like here in Australia! Struggling to even get 100Mbit business internet grade, let alone consumer grade. Typical speeds are more like 10mbit.
BTW 100-1000Gbit Internet available right now? who the fuck is offering that? i want one right now!
Again, your highway analogy only works with restrictive limitations. More highways irl only converge towards congestion because we can't build them indefinitely in an economic manner. If we kept building highways indefinitely, then at some point there would be more lanes than humans and thus no congestion whatsoever, even long before each person gets their own lane.
And again, our bandwidth is not even remotely utilized to its full capacity even when ignoring future changes. Congestion is a non-issue, at least with the issues that you've raised so far. As soon as it became one our bandwidth and data plans would adapt and that's that.
I'm saying 100-1000Gbit are easily possible, probably more by now since I've read about this quite a while ago. There's just no reason to offer those bandwidths when the most a consumer does is stream multiple 4k videos at the same time. See for example this article from 2007:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/12/swedish_woman_has_fastest_internet_connection/The argument with undeveloped countries (in terms of internet speed) doesn't hold if you argue for decentralization, unless you want the majority of "normal" people to run a node. There are enough people who can easily afford to run nodes and they don't. This won't change even if it's free simply because there's no immediate incentive for anyone to do so. If people acted in the ways necessary for that to work none of us would be using fiat money.
Edit: Not trying to say that there is no problem with big blocks. I don't know enough about the protocol to pass judgement on that front. But the bandwidth and storage issues seem heavily overblown to me and suffering from the same type of linear mindset that keeps people out of Bitcoin and investing in general.
#bullish
