Scaling Bitcoin¶
Like many people in the community I’ve spent the past month or so looking deeply into the bitcoin scaling debate. I feel there has never been a fully comprehensive thread on how bitcoin could scale. The closest I have seen is /u/gavinandresen‘s medium posts back in the summer describing the problem and a solution, and pre-emptively answering supposed problems with the solution. While these posts got to the core of the issue and spawned the debate we have been having, they were quite general and could have used more data in support. This is my research and proposal to scale bitcoin and bring the community back together.
Contents¶
- The Problem
- The Lightning Network
- Improving Network Efficiency
- Finding a Balanced Solution
- Propagation time
- Orphan Rate
- Non-Pruned Node Storage Cost
- Pruned Node Storage Cost
- Percentage of Downstream Bandwidth Used
- Percentage of Upstream Bandwidth Used
- Time to Bootstrap a New Node
- Storage cost
- Average Upload and Download Bandwidth Increases Over Time
- What should be the acceptable limit? What would be the growth over time?
- Price
- Adoption
- Proposal
- Conclusions and Summary