Transaction

j"1LAnZuoQdcKCkpDBKQMCgziGMoPC4VQUckM<div class="post">Every other P2P system is replicating the information across a small group of participating nodes who are all interested in that content. On average each BitTorrent user downloads the movie once and uploads it once and that's it. And if you can't or don't want to download that 100G movie pack (like the vast majority of internet users) you can still use BitTorrent for smaller things.<br/><br/>Bitcoin, on the other hand, gives the whole world (assuming the whole world uses it) a live feed of the whole world's financial transactions all the time, and doesn't stop.<br/><br/>Say it becomes a popular payment method like Paypal or Alipay, which each process a few million transactions a day. That few million multiplied by "less than a kilobyte" makes at least a few hundred MB per day. That's more than the average person's internet usage. In some places it's more than the average person's available internet quota. And then that has to be distributed to millions of nodes, putting a significant load on some networks, not just individuals' connections.<br/><br/>I guess it's not quite as bad as I initially thought, but it's still enough to make it impractical for many people to run their own bitcoin clients in a world where bitcoin is popular. The likely scenario (assuming no change to how Bitcoin works) is that most people use big payment providers instead and those providers use Bitcoin between each other.<br/><br/>And then one of those providers ends up dominating and has more CPUs than the rest combined, and the whole "bitcoin is secure as long as the honest CPUs collectively outnumber any attacker" thing becomes moot.<br/><br/>Maybe.</div> text/html