Questions about blockstore growth limits

Now… it is very realistic that blocks will hit 8MB in 5 years time. In that case, we’d be able to do 80M name registrations per year, which should be more than enough.

Remember that these calculations are just for ensuring that we can handle a scenario where this system gets as big as Facebook. This is not expected, and so we do not have any expectations or plans to clog up bitcoin transaction volume.

I read this great post by @ryan on technical options to help blockstore scale and some hypothetical questions came to mind:

I’m asking these questions not to attack but because I assume other people will ask members of the community similar questions. Hopefully it’ll help us if we discuss possible responses in advance:

  • “So if I use blockchain id for my new cool startup, it goes viral, and 50 million ppl sign up over the next year I have to migrate to something else?”

  • “What’s the vision for who is going to adopt blockstore/Blockchain ID when it can’t even handle one id for each person in a (small chinese) city?”

  • “Why should I adopt an identity technology that essentially caps my growth rate?”

  • “What do I tell my customers if the sign up rate is so high they need to wait days to use their account (before the name can confirm)?”

These aren’t entirely hypothetical questions. I’ve talked with financial regulators interested in this space who when told about the scalability limits said “oh but we have 700 million customer identities to keep track of.”

Hey thanks for posting this Larry. I responded in the GitHub thread as well. To answer your questions…

Well, I’d add one more thing to my proposal. We can allow name owners to distribute their own subdomains, and have them cryptographically commit to giving out the subdomains. That should allow a site to support an infinite number of names per person. And to be clear, if there is a cryptographic commitment involved, each user owns his/her own subname and the name owner can’t take it away from them or impersonate them.

See above.

See above.

This shouldn’t happen.

@larry I just added another proposal and corrected a mistake in an earlier proposal.

With both of these things considered, we the numbers should actually work out to 800M/year instead of 80M/year.

You can read up on the new proposal and corrected calculations here:

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