On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 10:07:31AM -0800, Thomas Hartman wrote:
> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=146307.msg1553756#msg1553756
>
> n squared violates my intuition, can someone explain this? i would think n.
>
> it seems really important to me in terms of guessing the future of the
> blockchain.

It's really simple: You have n people using Bitcoin. Each of them does a
single transaction per block, thus each block has n transactions. Thus
each person needs to download ~n bytes worth of blockchain data and do
~n worth of computation to validate those transactions. Thus the system
as a whole is doing n*n=n^2 work.

Anyway, there are possible solutions, if I don't post one by the end of
this weekend make fun of me for being tardy. :)

--
'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
00000000000000024905da5196bd2a088ddb98e7ca04716f059ffed0be1e62f8