Comments on: Why blockchain could change the world

By: John Jones

John Jones — Mon, 19 Sep 2016 00:08:23 +0000

You’ve certainly asked the right question; this is a key challenge right now. Each piece of data on the blockchain is very small since the whole contract is not stored, only a small key subset of info, however lots of transactions plus the fact that it’s stored in many places (different servers) means that total processing and storage requirements can add up (cost wise) over time. Both of these things have been historically getting both more plentiful and cheaper though so it’s not generally considered to be a killer problem when compared to the benefits of having a reliable public audit trail.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sun, 18 Sep 2016 22:11:34 +0000

So if I understand this correctly blockchain is simply an audit trail built into your electronic record. The next question is how big an audit trail do you keep? For instance in the case of money this could change hands multiple times in a day, in fact multiple times in a second if done electronically. The size of the blockchain could get very large very quickly and you are suggesting that multiple copies are held through out the system. This then raises the need for expanded storage across the network and some sort of management structure to ensure that at least one copy is held.