Bitcoin could shift to proof-of-stake if this occurs.

For any of those who are wondering, a proof-of-stake based altcoin is already in existence - PPCoin.

I am no technical expert, but as an analogy could this be a possible solution... to display the positions on a chessboard, one does not need to show all the moves made up until that point. One can just display the chessboard.

Thus as such, can't the blockchain be paused for a period of time, until a new "map" is put in place - and this could occur automatically after set periods or # of transactions - this way it never bloats and resets down close to zero.

Thanks for that - an interesting read.

I second this. People will still have to trade.

Thx god, we have Silk road. And will have it even in 20 years.

1) All the coins will not be mined until 2130.  If Bitcoin gained even 1% of the marketshare of gold the nominal value of even a 0.1 BTC block reward would be significant. 

2) Even if Bitcoin is primarily used for a store of wealth there will always be those looking to trade in and out, swap stored wealth for highly liquid fiat and the reverse.  Look at gold as an example.  Almost nobody uses gold for trade but gold is traded quite heavily around the world.

3) Merged mining still remains possible and an effective method to secure alt-chains.  Transaction revenue from alt-chains is currently negligible but over a long enough timeline it is in theory possible for an alt-chain to generate more revenue than the primary chain (Bitcoin).

A lot of miners though are apparently rejecting that revenue, apparently they think that every smidgeon of value in an altchain is somehow stolen from or undermining the value of the main chain.

It is a vicious circle too, if people don't mine them people won't push as much value through them so the rewards for mining them will be lower.

-MarkM-

This is commonly known as the "ledger solution" where a public ledger is created every 10-20 years or so.

This puts somewhat of a cap on the blockchains otherwise infinite growth.

If you also want huge tx levels light clients (electrum) or even later a "swarm client" becomes a must.


Store of value is definitely not enough, but trending towards larger transactions due to fees might happen until smarter clients have been developed.

Well if you have zero competition you could theoretically roll back the entire blockchain by mining an entirely new chain going back to the genesis block.