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I am new to bitcoins, but as I understand the technology:
- All transactions must be downloaded to the client machine (say, Grandma's Windows XP machine from 2003)
- New transactions are also sent to all clients
Is that correct?
If 1 billion people adopted Bitcoin as their primary currency, and performed an average of 1 transaction per day each, this would be 11,000 transactions per second every day on Grandma's Windows XP machine. I think it would catch fire!
As long as the block size limit doesn't get lifted, you simply can't send that many transactions. => Transaction cost will rise, and most transactions will be off-chain. – CodesInChaos – 2013-03-07T20:17:31.530
This has been discussed many, many times. To find some of those discussions, google "bitcoin scalability" and "bitcoin SPV" – Nick ODell – 2013-03-07T20:28:09.833
possible duplicate of What is going to happen when it is totally infeasible to download the entire bitcoin transaction history?
– Stephen Gornick – 2013-03-07T23:48:47.890