[tptacek]

In the world of computer science, 10 years is something like 3.3x the span of time between Altavista and Google. It's the span of time between the original spinning-hard-disk iPod and the iPhone 4S. It's approximately the time it took for AWS to go from zero to where it is today.

[jstanley]

But Bitcoin isn't a parallel to AWS. Bitcoin is a parallel to the first working implementation of virtualization.

[0wing]

No, Bitcoin is a parallel to distributed computing and databases.

PoW blockchains like Bitcoin only work by attempting to increase the capital cost of write access to the database. PoW blockchains purposefully waste as much computing power as possible and the transaction speed remains limited just the same even as computing power is added.

[gizmo686]

The compute power wasted is unrelated to the number of transactions. The only point of wasting the compute power is to be able to say that "this block has X compute backing it". If you do that, the security of bitcoin does not care how much is contained within the block.