# Gavin Andresen
# 2010-07-14 00:42:32
# https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=286.msg2696#msg2696

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That sounds about right. @p{par}

So a million transactions a day would be 600 million bytes.  600 megabytes a day, 18 GB a month. @p{par}

That's not bad.  Actual network bandwidth will be higher (the way the network is connected you get the same transaction multiple times from your peers).  You won't be running an always-connected-network node on your iPhone, but any low-cost server will give you twenty times that bandwidth per month.  And 18GB isn't much disk space in these days of terabyte hard drives. @p{par}

A million transactions per day is a @p{(bf}LOT@p{bf)}!  For comparison, in 2006 there were about @p{(link}60 million credit card transactions per day in the US@p{link)}. @p{par}

Eventually, if Bitcoin survives and gets as popular as credit cards for paying for stuff I expect somebody will create a compatible version with a more efficient network structure (maybe by that time there will be some fancy IPV6 multicast protocol or something).  And they'll implement a couple of gateway nodes (running on really fast connections) that shuttle transaction and block traffic from the current Bitcoin network into the super-efficient network.  And I expect most of us will be running lightweight clients that just keep our wallets, sign transactions, and send and receive transactions to the ultra-fast nodes that ARE looking at every transaction. @p{par}

You know, kind of like how we have those Big Routers in the Sky that handle Internet backbone traffic (or the ultra-fast DNS root servers).  The Internet didn't start out with astoundingly fast routers zinging packets around. @p{brk}