On 10/7/2017 8:20 AM, James A. Donald wrote:
Scaling, however, is the hard problem. Making enormous amounts of storage actually useful and effective is the problem. The amount of storage per client is absolutely insignificant. The amount of bandwidth per client is absolutely insignificant. Having a useful connection between enormous numbers of clients and enormous amounts of storage is the hard part.
I believe you were the first person to actually point this out to Satoshi. He replied by saying that 100GB per day is required to be processed every day by full nodes. (https://marc.info/?l=cryptography&m=122567739309991&w=1) However I am confused by his explanation of server farms. Wouldn't at one point result to a small number of full nodes due to costs? Isn't that preventive of decentralization? I fail to understand how Satoshi would think that the entire world can connect to let's say 50 worldwide server farms and this would somehow scale and be considered decentralized. The point of decentralization is that everyone can verify all transactions. This is done by verifying each transaction against all transactions back to genesis by yourself, not by trusting 50 centralized nodes. For all we can know, in 20 years from now only banking institutions will have the capital and benefit of running full nodes. ./gv