Cryptocurrency Privacy: Evolving... Zerocash (ZEC, ZCL, ZEN) vs All Other Coin

[James A. Donald]

On 06/10/2017 21:36, George Violaris wrote:
> On 06/10/2017 2:01 PM, James A. Donald wrote:
>> Suppose a cryptocurrency substantially replaces the US dollar and the 
>> existing banking system, and suppose we need to keep a year or so of 
>> transactions in active storage.
>>
>> How many transactions are full peers going to need to store?
>>
>> Or to say the same thing in other words, how many transactions do 
>> visa, mastercard, and the banking system do?
>>
> Visa handles an average of 150 million transactions per day. Bitcoin 
> currently handles around 350,000 transactions per day.

Visa is four hundred times as fast.  That is a gap we can close, though 
we will need to use a structure rather different than Bitcoin's

> Bitcoin has a 
> total of 250 million transaction all time. The bitcoin blockchain is at 
> 135GB and growing. So if Bitcoin is to reach Visa volume with it's 
> current algorithm it will need upwards of 120GB of new storage DAILY!

Assume that, instead of everyone being a peer, we have two dozen or so 
peers, the peers distributed among several nuclear armed jurisdictions, 
and each peer has a hundred million or so clients.

OK, we are talking rather large peers.  A terabyte of storage, a hundred 
dollars worth, will keep one of them going for a week.  I don't think 
cost of storage is going to be a significant problem.

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.