On Sun, Jul 5, 2015, 18:44 James A. Donald <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.