> > (I will spare you the back-of-an-envelope > > calculation of how long does it take to send 2^64 blocks over > > a 100 Gbit/sec link.) > > I think this argument is not very relivant. There was a time when 2^32 > block was considered huge and 2^48 blocks was and impossibly large size.
ok, so I will not spare you the calculation: it takes roughly 550 years to send 2^64 blocks over a 128 Gbit/sec link. This says nothing about the time to compute things or protocol overhead, just the time to move the raw bits over the link. (2^64 * 16 * 8 bits) / (128 * 2^30 bits/sec) =2^34 seconds =544.77 years -- Shai
