Transaction

j"1LAnZuoQdcKCkpDBKQMCgziGMoPC4VQUckM/<div class="post">mkrogh: Yes, you are correct. <br/><br/>There is absolutely no requirement for there to be such latency in the bitcoin system. Nothing fundamental would change if the system were implemented with a block list that updated every 10 seconds, instead of every 10 minutes. It was just a design decision that could be changed without effecting monetary policy a bit.<br/><br/>In fact, there is no requirement their be a block list that updates in increments at all. The system would work fine if each transaction were validated one-by-one. In effect one transaction per block. That was a design decision to make networked consensus building easier.<br/><br/>However, when you say "local transaction validation" what you are grasping for is a truly distributed system, rather than a monolithic system made redundant. The current version of bitcoin is the latter. Each node does exactly the same work as every other node. Each redundantly checking every transaction. It is a system horribly wasteful of resources. And because it is so wasteful, generates latency as a waste product.<br/><br/>Bitcoin could be made into a truly distributed system by storing the transaction graph in a distributed hash table. This is the kind of magic that is behind most other P2P systems. In effect, each bitcoin address would be arbitrarily mapped to a smaller set of nodes that checked its transactions. In such a system, there is no need to broadcast global state to every machine. This takes huge amount of latency out without needing to change any of the desired behavior.<br/></div> text/html