LinkedIn growth history 2006 - 2014: from 5 to 300 millions users --- 19April2014

Quo non ascendem?

How bitcoin may be already crumbling under its own success

The bitcoin community has recently discussed about government interference, but today, I want to discuss 2 mostly overlooked bitcoin news:
 * blockchain has reached a size of 8 Gb
 * transactions shall have, now, a minimum size

 These 2 events/news are closely related. Every transaction contributes to the 8Gb ledger size, and "they (the miners?)" want to limit the ledger size. This will be done by fighting transaction spam i.e. eliminating insignifiant exchanges and non-financial transactions such as those initiated by satoshidice.

Why is it needed to limit transactions when there are so few users?
Is limiting transactions today a sign that bitcoin will not scale well?

Some predict that bitcoin market capitalization will reach orders tens, hundred of billions or even trillions.
 * How many people will use bitcoins in a few years?
 * What will be, then, the size of the bitcoin ledger? Will it still be manageable? 

Most probably to keep the ledger at a computable size, transaction size will be limited to higher limits. People will be less able to use it, then, for day to day transactions, if the limit is set to 0.1 bitcoin (equivalent to 100$?) for instance.

Maybe are we going to need to use other currencies, for smaller amounts, such as litecoin sometimes deemed as "silver compared to bitcoin's gold"? If "open currencies" become mainstream, I guess in addition to gold and silver, copper, iron, lead and feather coins are going to be needed to be able to manage the huge number of transactions when half the planet is going to use these new currencies.

Today's amount of transfers is looking like ripples compared to tomorrow's tsunamis of transactions. If we consider bitcoin as the "Napster" of open currencies and expect future open currencies, answering to those questions, which I personnally find unsolved yet, is something essential.

Or ... did I miss something?

A few weeks ago, I understood that maybe oldest parts of the ledger will be dropped. When will that happen?

 Anyway the amount of transactions is already a problem because today  "they" feel they should limit the number of transactions.

LinkedIn growth history 2006 - 2012: from 5 to 160 millions users --- 31May2012

Is LinkedIn growth slowing down?

LinkedIn growth history 2006 - 2012: from 5 to 150 millions users --- 23February2012

LinkedIn growth history 2006 - 2011: from 5 to 135 millions users --- 23November2011

2010 - Trends of next years: oil spills, strikes in China...

Oil spills: worse may be to come...

Worse may be to come. One industry insider, who asked not to be named, said: "Major spills are likely to increase in the coming years as the industry strives to extract oil from increasingly remote and difficult terrains. Future supplies will be offshore, deeper and harder to work. When things go wrong, it will be harder to respond."

Wage raises and first strikes in China

FOSHAN, CHINA/TOKYO, May 31 (Reuters) - Workers at a strike-bound Honda Motor parts factory in southern China pressed on with a drive to win higher wages on Monday while the carmaker lured back many to partly resume production. read more

guardian.co.uk, Friday 28 May 2010 at Foxconn in Longhua, Guangdong province

And this morning the firm raised the base salary by 20%, which labour activists say will keep it narrowly ahead or in line with a rise in the minimum wage. read more

Chinese wages pose questions for exporters: Analysts at UBS, for example, estimate that Foxconn’s 30 per cent wage increase will translate into a 20 per cent reduction in company earnings this year. read more

Future of Requirement Management Tools

I've been looking at Requirement Management tools for 5 years now.

Requirement Management tools are all evolving towards a common view. They now offer the same kind of functionalities, in a similar way.

For instance, a few years ago, for most of the tools, the way to present requirements was only available as a list of requirements title. To look at the requirements details, you had to click on the specific requirement.
Now most of them, are offering a "word document view", where requirements can be displayed as a word document with chapters.

In the future, my feeling, is that what will be important is, not the functionalities offered by the tool itself, but the level of integration with test management, change/bug management and code source file management tools.

One of the main functionality of a Requirement Management tool is traceability. Traceability between marketing and technical requirements and specifications. This is today handled correctly by most RM tools, but an advantage comes when you can also link requirements with tests and build some test coverage tools for instance.

And we can go further by extending tracceability to changes/bugs and even source file.

Here is a view that summarizes my point:

One of CMMI Requirement Management specific practice says: ["SP 1.4 Maintain Bidirectional Traceability of Requirements" - Maintain bidirectional traceability among the requirements and work products.].
Using closely linked/integrated test management, change/bug management and code source file management tools is an "easy" way to achieve this goal.