On Sun, Jul 5, 2015, 18:44 James A. Donald <[1]jamesd@echeque.com>
   wrote:

     Way back in the beginning I said an ever growing block chain would
     cause
     unacceptable costs and inconvenience, and lo and behold, it is
     causing
     substantial and ever growing costs and inconvenience.

     Of course, restraining the block chain to manageable growth without
     losing other good characteristics is inherently hard, and it was a
     lot
     easier for me to point at the problem than to fix it.

   I had been hoping that we would see more stuff happening off-blockchain
   by now, with Bitcoin acting more as a clearing house between smaller
   payment providers, but all the regulations protecting the big banks
   from competition make it really hard to do anything off-blockchain that
   looks even remotely like a payments service. Side chains of some kind
   seem like a reasonable approach, and I'm guessing that it will be the
   difficulty of dealing with the "central" block chain that will finally
   force people "over the hump" into using some kind of sidechain payments
   system. I really want to see micropayments, for example, and those seem
   to be too unwieldy and expensive to do the main chain.

References

   1. mailto:jamesd@echeque.com