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But Ethereum's raison d'etre is "X for the blockchain". VISA does 56,000 tps. So it's really simple. How are you going to hit 56,000 tps on the blockchain. Th

But Ethereum's raison d'etre is "X for the blockchain". VISA does 56,000 tps. So it's really simple. How are you going to hit 56,000 tps on the blockchain. The Bitcoin community, which is far bigger and generally more experienced than Ethereum's just spent 18 months vigorously debating this question. Do you suggest Ethereum has come up with a better answer? And the criticism here is around the selling point of Ethereum: "everything goes on the blockchain". You're telling me after 18 months of debate, the best you've got to say about that is: "an account based architecture"? What is it about widgets fully encapsulated in a blockchain-native smart contract on Ethereum that makes it so much more scaleable than a similar widget on Bitcoin's blockchain?

simondlr 11y ago
There are several things Ethereum does currently that's better for scaling. 1) It produces blocks every 17 seconds. It can do this without neglecting security, because orphan blocks count as uncles and are included in the security of the whole network. 2) It has a scalable/dynamic blocksize. The miners can scale the gas limit up or down by a certain amount. If the current gas limit (pi million) gets hit, miners can start increasing it. 3) Tx fees purpose is primarily for DDOS protection & solving the halting problem with turing-complete scripts. It's not a fundamental element for security, because the issuance rate is constant. This means that a "fee market" doesn't need to exist as much as in Bitcoin, in order to make sure the blockchain remains alive. It has an infinite, but predictable supply, rather than finite. 4) Future scalability improvements include Casper PoS, which will decrease block time to around 1 - 4 seconds & sharding, which will remove the need for every node to process every part of the transaction space. These additions will mean that for the current period, transactions will increase, and perhaps lead to more centralization as not many will run nodes to keep the whole state. This is a trade-off in return for running more transactions.
- Anonobread 11y ago
  What block size for Ethereum's blockchain would be required to hit 56,000 tps? I'm really getting some deja vu in having to write this out for the millionth time in a 18 month period. None of your talking points magically address the extreme costs of prerequisite physical infrastructure needed to hit 56,000 tps. Bottom line, it's impossible to match the throughput capacity of just a single credit card company on any blockchain, be it Bitcoin or Ethereum or BBQCoin, without incurring enormous costs in terms of CPU and bandwidth. This is to say nothing of doing decentralized exchanges, order matching, and option contracts - all of which Ethereum has been advertised as doing on a blockchain. For that you'd need hundreds of thousands of tps.
  - brighton36 11y ago
    Thank-you for writing this for the umpteenth time. I write these same points myself, constantly, as well. Most of the people in the ethereum project are delusional teenagers looking to get rich quick.
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      What's your take on my claim? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11184214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11184214 Note: Reply there if you do.
  - darawk 11y ago
    Make block time 1s. Allow blocks to hold 1M transactions. Problem solved? Granted, this doesn't deliver the physical infrastructure to process that many transactions - but that will happen over time. Visa didn't process 56k tps on day one, either.
- david-given 11y ago
  Is that 17 seconds per block globally, or per client? If it's global, how long would the average client take to generate a block? If it's going to take hours to generate a block, I'm worried that it's going to take forever for an app to generate enough ether to get anything done; buying the stuff using real money is a nonstarter for most applications, so generating it on demand is the only real option.
crazydoggers 11y ago
Well, as I understand it, there's no technical reason Ethereum can't do the 56,000 tps. Ethereum has no fixed block size. Realistically, obviously, you'd need more and more compute power. The end goal is to prevent only having large institutions running nodes and to keep the system more decentralized, hence the need for better scaling options. (Bitcoin has become more decentralized as it has aged, with fewer small nodes running) And I'm not saying that Ethereum has it all solved, just that the system is different enough that some of the issues are not applicable. It's not useful, in my opinion, to just throw up your hands and say "It can never scale!!". First because there's no absolute limitation for scaling, only things that make it costly. Back in the day, if you asked someone how the early Internet was going to scale, it would have seemed like an equally impossible task. There's plenty of time to work on the issues before we need 56,000 tps.
- Anonobread 11y ago
  > The end goal is to prevent only having large institutions running nodes and to keep the system more decentralized, hence the need for better scaling options. (Bitcoin has become more decentralized as it has aged, with fewer small nodes running) Right, but that wasn't the question I raised. I asked what does Ethereum do different than Bitcoin that makes its blockchain more scaleable? The answer is, of course, nothing. If merge-mined sidechains and overlay protocols are your solution, Bitcoin is non-stop innovating in that direction. > It's not useful, in my opinion, to just throw up your hands and say "It can never scale!!". But if you're just going to throw up your hands and say "put it in the cloud", that's no different than what Bitcoin bigblockists want to do.
  - crazydoggers 11y ago
    > I asked what does Ethereum do different than Bitcoin that makes its blockchain more scaleable But I did answer what it does different. I cited a few of the many things it does different, one of which is an account based model. Another is faster and unlimited sized blocks. And if you care to read more of the development threads, you'd find lots of other solutions. Ignoring facts and continuing to say "The answer is, of course, nothing" is just FUD. Here's a quote from Vitalik in October: "Scalability: using a combination of sharding schemes, random sampling, heavy use of Merkle proofs and asynchronous calling in order to increase the potential transaction throughput from ~10-20 transactions per second to over 100000 (or, if super-quadratic versions are used, a theoretically unlimited number). The basic concepts behind scaling have been set in stone for over six months, and our research team is highly confident that the general approach is valid;" > But if you're just going to throw up your hands and say "put it in the cloud" Who said anything of the sort? I'm saying it's a hard problem, but it's tractable and takes resources and time. What's that got to do with the cloud?? Ultimately I don't understand the whole negative attitude on scaling. Obstacles are not a reason to not attempt something, and certainly not potential scaling issues. Making the Internet was hard. In 1993 people could have said "computers are expensive.. and think of all the cables you'd have to lay! It's going to be millions of miles of cables! It'll never happen! This whole WWW thing is just a toy fad!"
empath75 11y ago
Blockchains don't need to take over a substantial percentage of economic activity to be useful. I don't understand why people bring up transaction limits as if they permanently cripple the technology.
- Anonobread 11y ago
  The throughput capacity of Bitcoin, being programmable money, isn't a user limit. We can just as soon put billions of users with BTC-denominated accounts at higher layers of abstraction, and in fact this is exactly what Bitcoin's core developers aim to achieve. It doesn't make any sense to globally broadcast every last Starbucks coffee and permanently etch it into an immutable database at enormous cost.
nickik 11y ago
The bitcoin debate is mostly political, not technical, even if their are lots of techlogical aspects to it. Butshares allready has an architecure that can deal with 200000 transactions a second. I dont know if etherium could do the same.
ChemicalWarfare 11y ago
56k TPS is a supposed peak at burst volumes, in reality the number is closer to 3K TPS but that's beside the point. Until there's a real need for bitcoin to support this sort of volume (if ever) I don't think comparing bitcoin to visa tps wise proves anything. If there's enough customer adoption where there's a need to handle that kind of volume you can rest assured there will be infrastructure to support it and instead of a loose group of "core devs" there will be an official salaried department (at visa? :) ) working on this full time.
- Anonobread 11y ago
  > If there's enough customer adoption where there's a need to handle that kind of volume you can rest assured there will be infrastructure to support it and instead of a loose group of "core devs" there will be an official salaried department (at visa? :) ) working on this full time. But since we're talking about "decentralized systems", the question is who owns the blockchain infrastructure. Is the blockchain going to be serviceable on home desktop PCs, or are you going to need a datacenter? To really drive this example home, could you please quote me a price on building out a Tier 1 datacenter with gigabit fiber? Because last I checked most people don't have that kind of money in their sofa cushion. And it isn't even remotely feasible to acquire that sort of infrastructure anonymously. Yet that's what it's going to take to hit 56,000 tps on a blockchain any time this decade or perhaps even after [1]: > Next month, the worldwide semiconductor industry will formally acknowledge what has become increasingly obvious to everyone involved: Moore's law, the principle that has powered the information-technology revolution since the 1960s, is nearing its end. A common mistake is confusing "popularity" with decentralization. BitTorrent is both popular and decentralized. It doesn't take a datacenter and a 10-machine cluster to participate in a BT swarm as a full-on peer. As an aside, it's no surprise the creator of BitTorrent is staunchly against scaling Bitcoin in datacenters [2]. [1]: http://www.nature.com/news/the-chips-are-down-for-moore-s-law-1.19338 http://www.nature.com/news/the-chips-are-down-for-moore-s-la... [1]: http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=417 http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=417 [2]: https://medium.com/@bramcohen/bitcoin-s-ironic-crisis-32226a85e39f https://medium.com/@bramcohen/bitcoin-s-ironic-crisis-32226a...
  - 11y ago
nickpsecurity 11y ago
"VISA does 56,000 tps." That's what I keep telling them. The whole of credit processing and banking... even the Fed... runs on centralized, transactional architectures with redundant datacenters and optionally redundant checks from mutually-distrusting parties. What people want to do can be built on a highly-efficient, log-based system with distributed checking run by a foundation (or international collaboration) in a neutral country. It would be simpler, more secure, use less energy, faster, and so on. Additionally, we can choose what level of detail we want in reporting or auditing to reduce data overload. These blockchain models want everything to go on a blockchain whose operational hurdles even they can't agree on. It's like this subfield of IT is ignoring simple solutions to simple problems while pushing complex solutions with complex problems. So, I add to your own question: what is it about a smart contract on Bitcoin or Ethereum that couldn't be done with a signed email or website document optionally run through a few cryptographic notaries? The latter is not only simpler and more efficient: it's in use commercially with many courts already approving of concepts and some implementations.
- Anonobread 11y ago
  Ironically, the only people who have made money on smart contracts - cough Ethereum - did it by convincing other investors to part with their money subsequent to selling those investors on the idea of smart contracts. That whole sub-niche industry is just a big cess pool of people chasing investment gains that we're told can be had by pointlessly tilting at windmills. Conversely, Bitcoin never promised smart contracts. To the extent Bitcoiners take part in Ethereum debates, we're only doing it because we know the real game Ethereum is playing is diverting investment capital away from Bitcoin.
  - brighton36 11y ago
    Very good answer.
  - jgalt212 11y ago
    > diverting investment capital away from Bitcoin Even if that were true, that would necessarily be a bad thing in the interests of not putting all your eggs in one basket.

simondlr 11y ago

There are several things Ethereum does currently that's better for scaling. 1) It produces blocks every 17 seconds. It can do this without neglecting security, because orphan blocks count as uncles and are included in the security of the whole network. 2) It has a scalable/dynamic blocksize. The miners can scale the gas limit up or down by a certain amount. If the current gas limit (pi million) gets hit, miners can start increasing it. 3) Tx fees purpose is primarily for DDOS protection & solving the halting problem with turing-complete scripts. It's not a fundamental element for security, because the issuance rate is constant. This means that a "fee market" doesn't need to exist as much as in Bitcoin, in order to make sure the blockchain remains alive. It has an infinite, but predictable supply, rather than finite. 4) Future scalability improvements include Casper PoS, which will decrease block time to around 1 - 4 seconds & sharding, which will remove the need for every node to process every part of the transaction space. These additions will mean that for the current period, transactions will increase, and perhaps lead to more centralization as not many will run nodes to keep the whole state. This is a trade-off in return for running more transactions.

Anonobread 11y ago
What block size for Ethereum's blockchain would be required to hit 56,000 tps? I'm really getting some deja vu in having to write this out for the millionth time in a 18 month period. None of your talking points magically address the extreme costs of prerequisite physical infrastructure needed to hit 56,000 tps. Bottom line, it's impossible to match the throughput capacity of just a single credit card company on any blockchain, be it Bitcoin or Ethereum or BBQCoin, without incurring enormous costs in terms of CPU and bandwidth. This is to say nothing of doing decentralized exchanges, order matching, and option contracts - all of which Ethereum has been advertised as doing on a blockchain. For that you'd need hundreds of thousands of tps.
- brighton36 11y ago
  Thank-you for writing this for the umpteenth time. I write these same points myself, constantly, as well. Most of the people in the ethereum project are delusional teenagers looking to get rich quick.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    What's your take on my claim? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11184214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11184214 Note: Reply there if you do.
- darawk 11y ago
  Make block time 1s. Allow blocks to hold 1M transactions. Problem solved? Granted, this doesn't deliver the physical infrastructure to process that many transactions - but that will happen over time. Visa didn't process 56k tps on day one, either.
david-given 11y ago
Is that 17 seconds per block globally, or per client? If it's global, how long would the average client take to generate a block? If it's going to take hours to generate a block, I'm worried that it's going to take forever for an app to generate enough ether to get anything done; buying the stuff using real money is a nonstarter for most applications, so generating it on demand is the only real option.

crazydoggers 11y ago

Well, as I understand it, there's no technical reason Ethereum can't do the 56,000 tps. Ethereum has no fixed block size. Realistically, obviously, you'd need more and more compute power. The end goal is to prevent only having large institutions running nodes and to keep the system more decentralized, hence the need for better scaling options. (Bitcoin has become more decentralized as it has aged, with fewer small nodes running) And I'm not saying that Ethereum has it all solved, just that the system is different enough that some of the issues are not applicable. It's not useful, in my opinion, to just throw up your hands and say "It can never scale!!". First because there's no absolute limitation for scaling, only things that make it costly. Back in the day, if you asked someone how the early Internet was going to scale, it would have seemed like an equally impossible task. There's plenty of time to work on the issues before we need 56,000 tps.

Anonobread 11y ago
> The end goal is to prevent only having large institutions running nodes and to keep the system more decentralized, hence the need for better scaling options. (Bitcoin has become more decentralized as it has aged, with fewer small nodes running) Right, but that wasn't the question I raised. I asked what does Ethereum do different than Bitcoin that makes its blockchain more scaleable? The answer is, of course, nothing. If merge-mined sidechains and overlay protocols are your solution, Bitcoin is non-stop innovating in that direction. > It's not useful, in my opinion, to just throw up your hands and say "It can never scale!!". But if you're just going to throw up your hands and say "put it in the cloud", that's no different than what Bitcoin bigblockists want to do.
- crazydoggers 11y ago
  > I asked what does Ethereum do different than Bitcoin that makes its blockchain more scaleable But I did answer what it does different. I cited a few of the many things it does different, one of which is an account based model. Another is faster and unlimited sized blocks. And if you care to read more of the development threads, you'd find lots of other solutions. Ignoring facts and continuing to say "The answer is, of course, nothing" is just FUD. Here's a quote from Vitalik in October: "Scalability: using a combination of sharding schemes, random sampling, heavy use of Merkle proofs and asynchronous calling in order to increase the potential transaction throughput from ~10-20 transactions per second to over 100000 (or, if super-quadratic versions are used, a theoretically unlimited number). The basic concepts behind scaling have been set in stone for over six months, and our research team is highly confident that the general approach is valid;" > But if you're just going to throw up your hands and say "put it in the cloud" Who said anything of the sort? I'm saying it's a hard problem, but it's tractable and takes resources and time. What's that got to do with the cloud?? Ultimately I don't understand the whole negative attitude on scaling. Obstacles are not a reason to not attempt something, and certainly not potential scaling issues. Making the Internet was hard. In 1993 people could have said "computers are expensive.. and think of all the cables you'd have to lay! It's going to be millions of miles of cables! It'll never happen! This whole WWW thing is just a toy fad!"

empath75 11y ago

Blockchains don't need to take over a substantial percentage of economic activity to be useful. I don't understand why people bring up transaction limits as if they permanently cripple the technology.

Anonobread 11y ago
The throughput capacity of Bitcoin, being programmable money, isn't a user limit. We can just as soon put billions of users with BTC-denominated accounts at higher layers of abstraction, and in fact this is exactly what Bitcoin's core developers aim to achieve. It doesn't make any sense to globally broadcast every last Starbucks coffee and permanently etch it into an immutable database at enormous cost.

nickik 11y ago

The bitcoin debate is mostly political, not technical, even if their are lots of techlogical aspects to it. Butshares allready has an architecure that can deal with 200000 transactions a second. I dont know if etherium could do the same.

ChemicalWarfare 11y ago

56k TPS is a supposed peak at burst volumes, in reality the number is closer to 3K TPS but that's beside the point. Until there's a real need for bitcoin to support this sort of volume (if ever) I don't think comparing bitcoin to visa tps wise proves anything. If there's enough customer adoption where there's a need to handle that kind of volume you can rest assured there will be infrastructure to support it and instead of a loose group of "core devs" there will be an official salaried department (at visa? :) ) working on this full time.

Anonobread 11y ago
> If there's enough customer adoption where there's a need to handle that kind of volume you can rest assured there will be infrastructure to support it and instead of a loose group of "core devs" there will be an official salaried department (at visa? :) ) working on this full time. But since we're talking about "decentralized systems", the question is who owns the blockchain infrastructure. Is the blockchain going to be serviceable on home desktop PCs, or are you going to need a datacenter? To really drive this example home, could you please quote me a price on building out a Tier 1 datacenter with gigabit fiber? Because last I checked most people don't have that kind of money in their sofa cushion. And it isn't even remotely feasible to acquire that sort of infrastructure anonymously. Yet that's what it's going to take to hit 56,000 tps on a blockchain any time this decade or perhaps even after [1]: > Next month, the worldwide semiconductor industry will formally acknowledge what has become increasingly obvious to everyone involved: Moore's law, the principle that has powered the information-technology revolution since the 1960s, is nearing its end. A common mistake is confusing "popularity" with decentralization. BitTorrent is both popular and decentralized. It doesn't take a datacenter and a 10-machine cluster to participate in a BT swarm as a full-on peer. As an aside, it's no surprise the creator of BitTorrent is staunchly against scaling Bitcoin in datacenters [2]. [1]: http://www.nature.com/news/the-chips-are-down-for-moore-s-law-1.19338 http://www.nature.com/news/the-chips-are-down-for-moore-s-la... [1]: http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=417 http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=417 [2]: https://medium.com/@bramcohen/bitcoin-s-ironic-crisis-32226a85e39f https://medium.com/@bramcohen/bitcoin-s-ironic-crisis-32226a...
- 11y ago

nickpsecurity 11y ago

"VISA does 56,000 tps." That's what I keep telling them. The whole of credit processing and banking... even the Fed... runs on centralized, transactional architectures with redundant datacenters and optionally redundant checks from mutually-distrusting parties. What people want to do can be built on a highly-efficient, log-based system with distributed checking run by a foundation (or international collaboration) in a neutral country. It would be simpler, more secure, use less energy, faster, and so on. Additionally, we can choose what level of detail we want in reporting or auditing to reduce data overload. These blockchain models want everything to go on a blockchain whose operational hurdles even they can't agree on. It's like this subfield of IT is ignoring simple solutions to simple problems while pushing complex solutions with complex problems. So, I add to your own question: what is it about a smart contract on Bitcoin or Ethereum that couldn't be done with a signed email or website document optionally run through a few cryptographic notaries? The latter is not only simpler and more efficient: it's in use commercially with many courts already approving of concepts and some implementations.

Anonobread 11y ago
Ironically, the only people who have made money on smart contracts - cough Ethereum - did it by convincing other investors to part with their money subsequent to selling those investors on the idea of smart contracts. That whole sub-niche industry is just a big cess pool of people chasing investment gains that we're told can be had by pointlessly tilting at windmills. Conversely, Bitcoin never promised smart contracts. To the extent Bitcoiners take part in Ethereum debates, we're only doing it because we know the real game Ethereum is playing is diverting investment capital away from Bitcoin.
- brighton36 11y ago
  Very good answer.
- jgalt212 11y ago
  > diverting investment capital away from Bitcoin Even if that were true, that would necessarily be a bad thing in the interests of not putting all your eggs in one basket.