| I can send money around the world with it. You can too. Will it hold up when 10 million people want to do that per day? 100 million? Half 1 billion? I know it can work at niche scales (relative to total global financial transactions) but can it actually be scaled up to be a real player? Even if the block size was massively larger, say 100 MB, would enough transactions be able to be broadcasted around fast enough to be able to be collected in giant blocks to keep up with demand? As to hardest/impossible for a government to steal from you: this is the mining pool problem. What if China decided to do something about all of the mining pools they have in their country and try and manipulate bitcoin? What if in addition to the pools that they could get/force to cooperate they added a bunch more miners with government computers? What if the US government just decided to throw computer power at trying to make the dominant hashrate mining pool? I'm guessing there are number of governments in the world it would be capable of doing that TODAY. They could certainly do it if they cooperated. Even if they can't take over they could throw enough uncertainty into the process to cause the price to crash. If they all competed against each other we could end up in a situation where even know if theoretically no one controls bit coin realistically it's controlled by a bunch of giant governments and no one else is capable of competing. Oops, that sort of like the current banking system. Like I said it's a fascinating idea, but I don't think it works at planet scale or if people can independently buy additional hashing capacity. It seems like it would have to have some sort of agreement to limit everyone to be roughly equal for it to work out almost anywhere. I'd love to see history prove me wrong. I don't remember seening a solution to the problems that worry me yet. If they exist I'm not smart enough to think of them. We'll see what happens. |