5 ms·

Isn't Bitcoin capped to 10TPS and Ethereum to 25TPS? How is this technology going to handle real-time large volume of payments without reducing latency in the o

by bitL 9y ago

Isn't Bitcoin capped to 10TPS and Ethereum to 25TPS? How is this technology going to handle real-time large volume of payments without reducing latency in the order of a few magnitudes? If this is not addressed, *coins are just an experimental vaporware.

dgut 9y ago
They are the Wright 1899 kite. We have yet to build a Boeing 787. Most of the development is happening in "altcoins" anyways.
- rothbardrand 9y ago
  Altocins have an incentive to hype what they are going to do. bitcoin is conservative and doesn't hype (no ICO) so people miss how much is actually happening. Bitcoin is dominant in large part because it has the best development team and they are delivering code at a huge rate-- even compared to ethereum.
bishopknight 9y ago
Answer: Litecoin, Segwit, Lightning Network, Atomic Swaps, etc
tedsanders 9y ago
Bitcoin faces serious barriers in scaling to high volumes. As you say, transactions are limited to ~10/s. A side effect of this is that transaction fees are now $2 per transaction (and rising). Furthermore, the blockchain has now exceeded 100 GB in size. At high volumes, this will approach the petabyte scale. Only data centers will be able to store the blockchain, and power will be concentrated in the few players able to build/rent blockchain data centers. However, these barriers do not mean Bitcoin is doomed to fail. Logically, there are two paths to success: (1) Bitcoin is rearchitected to handle high volumes or (2) Bitcoin succeeds in low-volume applications.
- bitL 9y ago
  So BTC is more like gold then, but with "fiat" value. It's an amazing experiment from computational/cryptographic point of view for sure. The greedy madness around it will cause a lot of troubles though; I've heard people taking 2nd mortgages and going heavily in debt to buy BTCs...
  - sp821543 9y ago
    Exactly. Nobody complains about the transaction capacity of gold. Bitcoin is a store of value - especially useful if our financial system sours again.
    - hackernudes 9y ago
      Gold is hard to transact with due to physics, but ideally a digital currency should be capable of micro-transactions. Here is a quote from the bitcoin.pdf white paper: The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions... If your vision of the future of Bitcoin is simply "a store of value" then I think you are missing out. There is a lot more value to disrupt by making transactions more efficient, and I hope the Bitcoin of the future will evolve to tackle this problem.
- nordsieck 9y ago
  transactions are limited to ~10/s [...] At high volumes, this will approach the petabyte scale This is a big reason why many people want to keep the transaction size small. Currently, hard drive size is expanding faster than the block chain.
  - rothbardrand 9y ago
    MAST is in discussion now and will dramatically reduce transaction sizes (SEgwit already did it too, and segwit is still being deployed).... with MAST bitcoin will be more of a smart contract system, and even very complex transactions will be tiny.
ryandvm 9y ago
It's pretty funny. Almost all the investment interest in Bitcoin and Ethereum isn't about the technology's potential. It's all just speculation on the current cryptocurrencies as commodities. Just about everyone asking "should I buy Bitcoin?" is doing so because they want to know how high it will go. They don't really give a shit whether the technology has the potential to disrupt centrally planned economies. Bitcoin being worth $5,000 right now is all about not being the last guy holding the bag when the value collapses again...
- rothbardrand 9y ago
  Speculating on the price growth is literally speculating on several things: 1. The technologies future potential. 2. Investing based on the realized potential we have seen in the last year. 3. Speculating that the technology will more widely adopted. Just because its a currency doesn't mean it's not going thru the technology adoption cycle, like the internet did and the smart phone did. More people owning bitcoin means more demand means higher price in the face of relatively fixed supply... so "Just speculation" doesn't really make sense as a criticism--- ALL investment is speculation, all investment in early stage technologies is higher risk, and more "speculative".
  - kobeya 9y ago
    The supply argument isn’t any different from Tulips in the mercantile Netherlands back in the day. This is coming from a bitcoin enthusiast that loves the technology.
    - rothbardrand 9y ago
      Supply of tulips is not fixed. Bitcoin is.
      - kobeya 9y ago
        That didn’t really have a bearing on the tulip mania.
ojr 9y ago
good question, my bet is Bitcoin Cash will be the cryptocurrency that will scale to the masses, it has a larger block size for transactions and large mining rigs support
- rothbardrand 9y ago
  BCASH has less capacity than BTC does now, in large part due to Segwit (which BCASH doesn't have.) BCASH is a miner sorta scam, they will mine 60 blocks in a minute for awhile until the difficulty shifts, then not mine any blocks for 12 hours. Sucks to wait 12 hours for a transaction to clear.
shepardrtc 9y ago
There are other currencies out there that have been designed to do that, such as Ripple (it can sustain 1000TPS, I think). Its also 3rd in volume behind BTC and ETH, and its being deployed to banks.
- rothbardrand 9y ago
  Ripple isn't a cryptocurrency and it's not distributed, it's not really comparable, as its centralized. When you're centralized its trivial to deliver high transaction rates but you lose all of bitcoins advantages. Stay away from Ripple.
  - shepardrtc 9y ago
    That's not true at all. Ripple (XRP) is a cryptocurrency and it is distributed.
    - rothbardrand 9y ago
      Let me put it this way-- when one of the founders left, the company froze his Ripple. You can't do that with a true cryptocurrency.
      - shepardrtc 9y ago
        What about when that Ethereum got stolen and the devs hard-forked it to get it back?
bulldoa 9y ago
does iota solves this problem?
- rothbardrand 9y ago
  It pretends to, but they made their own terrible hash function and their "coordinator" is closed source and centralized. Beware.
  - bulldoa 9y ago
    is there other crypto that has high tps potential? like replacing credit cards transaction....
kobeya 9y ago
Those numbers are settlements, not transactions. Bitcoin has no transaction cap as most transactions can be moved off chain.
- eosophos 9y ago
  off chain how? wouldn't that compromise decentralization and censorship resistance?
  - rothbardrand 9y ago
    Lightening network and side chains, are two of the technologies that do this, and neither compromise decentralization or censorship resistance or security. In fact, they enhance those qualities.
    - kobeya 9y ago
      To be clear, sidechain transactions are just transactions on another chain. I wouldn’t call that off chain as it actually introduces more transactions (to move across the peg).
      - rothbardrand 9y ago
        It's less transactions. Imagine you're paying your cable bill.. you can move some value to the side chain (one transaction) then make 12 monthly transactions-- on the side chain, so off the main chain--and then after cancelling move the balance back to the main chain (second transaction) Thus 14 transactions become 2.
        kobeya 9y ago
        The amount of on chain transactions supported by a global mining network is fixed. You can’t just keep adding side chains or else you will run into the same scaling limits.
  - kobeya 9y ago
XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
The not so generally accepted answer for Bitcoin's low TPS is to use something called the lighting network. It's a way to lock up funds so you can tx with low fees and quick confirmations because you aren't hitting the main chain until you want to withdraw your funds. It's performing a wire transfer to venmo, once you do it you don't have to pay to move it around in venmo, except with the lighting network there is no counter party risk. If venmo gets hacked you don't lose your funds, they can't try and steal them, they can't prevent you from withdrawing. The technical details are, a bit hairy though.
XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
Bitcoin is the access point to just about every other cryptocurrency. So if you want to buy most cryptocurrencies the path of least resistance (for most people) is to buy bitcoin and then buy something else. That of course doesn't say why someone would want to buy any cruptocurrency, but if you primary concern is the low TPS on Bitcoin and Ethereum then there's plenty of other options.
rothbardrand 9y ago
Bitcoins capacity is growing all the time, Segwit is a big jump, and MAST and other technologies will increase it further. Not to mention, we're about a year away from Lightening Networks being deployed into production, and he theoretical capacity of that is infinite, since it happens off chain. (LN will eventually be multiparty-- so you could get paid in your channel and then pay from your channel to various other receivers, though that capability may be more than a year off.) Further, segwit enables side chains so you can have bitcoin as a hub and any number of side chains with special purposes (including possibly very high transaction velocity) adding... with even less on chain load than lightening network, depending on how they are used. The tech is advancing rapidly, though it's highly involved and obscure to even most developers, so they propagandists are great at spreading FUD in favor of their particular choices. All of the above applies to Ethereum as well, to varying degrees of implementation.

by bitL 9y ago

dgut 9y ago

They are the Wright 1899 kite. We have yet to build a Boeing 787. Most of the development is happening in "altcoins" anyways.

rothbardrand 9y ago
Altocins have an incentive to hype what they are going to do. bitcoin is conservative and doesn't hype (no ICO) so people miss how much is actually happening. Bitcoin is dominant in large part because it has the best development team and they are delivering code at a huge rate-- even compared to ethereum.

bishopknight 9y ago

Answer: Litecoin, Segwit, Lightning Network, Atomic Swaps, etc

tedsanders 9y ago

Bitcoin faces serious barriers in scaling to high volumes. As you say, transactions are limited to ~10/s. A side effect of this is that transaction fees are now $2 per transaction (and rising). Furthermore, the blockchain has now exceeded 100 GB in size. At high volumes, this will approach the petabyte scale. Only data centers will be able to store the blockchain, and power will be concentrated in the few players able to build/rent blockchain data centers. However, these barriers do not mean Bitcoin is doomed to fail. Logically, there are two paths to success: (1) Bitcoin is rearchitected to handle high volumes or (2) Bitcoin succeeds in low-volume applications.

bitL 9y ago
So BTC is more like gold then, but with "fiat" value. It's an amazing experiment from computational/cryptographic point of view for sure. The greedy madness around it will cause a lot of troubles though; I've heard people taking 2nd mortgages and going heavily in debt to buy BTCs...
- sp821543 9y ago
  Exactly. Nobody complains about the transaction capacity of gold. Bitcoin is a store of value - especially useful if our financial system sours again.
  - hackernudes 9y ago
    Gold is hard to transact with due to physics, but ideally a digital currency should be capable of micro-transactions. Here is a quote from the bitcoin.pdf white paper: The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions... If your vision of the future of Bitcoin is simply "a store of value" then I think you are missing out. There is a lot more value to disrupt by making transactions more efficient, and I hope the Bitcoin of the future will evolve to tackle this problem.
nordsieck 9y ago
transactions are limited to ~10/s [...] At high volumes, this will approach the petabyte scale This is a big reason why many people want to keep the transaction size small. Currently, hard drive size is expanding faster than the block chain.
- rothbardrand 9y ago
  MAST is in discussion now and will dramatically reduce transaction sizes (SEgwit already did it too, and segwit is still being deployed).... with MAST bitcoin will be more of a smart contract system, and even very complex transactions will be tiny.

ryandvm 9y ago

It's pretty funny. Almost all the investment interest in Bitcoin and Ethereum isn't about the technology's potential. It's all just speculation on the current cryptocurrencies as commodities. Just about everyone asking "should I buy Bitcoin?" is doing so because they want to know how high it will go. They don't really give a shit whether the technology has the potential to disrupt centrally planned economies. Bitcoin being worth $5,000 right now is all about not being the last guy holding the bag when the value collapses again...

rothbardrand 9y ago
Speculating on the price growth is literally speculating on several things: 1. The technologies future potential. 2. Investing based on the realized potential we have seen in the last year. 3. Speculating that the technology will more widely adopted. Just because its a currency doesn't mean it's not going thru the technology adoption cycle, like the internet did and the smart phone did. More people owning bitcoin means more demand means higher price in the face of relatively fixed supply... so "Just speculation" doesn't really make sense as a criticism--- ALL investment is speculation, all investment in early stage technologies is higher risk, and more "speculative".
- kobeya 9y ago
  The supply argument isn’t any different from Tulips in the mercantile Netherlands back in the day. This is coming from a bitcoin enthusiast that loves the technology.
  - rothbardrand 9y ago
    Supply of tulips is not fixed. Bitcoin is.
    - kobeya 9y ago
      That didn’t really have a bearing on the tulip mania.

ojr 9y ago

good question, my bet is Bitcoin Cash will be the cryptocurrency that will scale to the masses, it has a larger block size for transactions and large mining rigs support

rothbardrand 9y ago
BCASH has less capacity than BTC does now, in large part due to Segwit (which BCASH doesn't have.) BCASH is a miner sorta scam, they will mine 60 blocks in a minute for awhile until the difficulty shifts, then not mine any blocks for 12 hours. Sucks to wait 12 hours for a transaction to clear.

shepardrtc 9y ago

There are other currencies out there that have been designed to do that, such as Ripple (it can sustain 1000TPS, I think). Its also 3rd in volume behind BTC and ETH, and its being deployed to banks.

rothbardrand 9y ago
Ripple isn't a cryptocurrency and it's not distributed, it's not really comparable, as its centralized. When you're centralized its trivial to deliver high transaction rates but you lose all of bitcoins advantages. Stay away from Ripple.
- shepardrtc 9y ago
  That's not true at all. Ripple (XRP) is a cryptocurrency and it is distributed.
  - rothbardrand 9y ago
    Let me put it this way-- when one of the founders left, the company froze his Ripple. You can't do that with a true cryptocurrency.
    - shepardrtc 9y ago
      What about when that Ethereum got stolen and the devs hard-forked it to get it back?

bulldoa 9y ago

does iota solves this problem?

rothbardrand 9y ago
It pretends to, but they made their own terrible hash function and their "coordinator" is closed source and centralized. Beware.
- bulldoa 9y ago
  is there other crypto that has high tps potential? like replacing credit cards transaction....

kobeya 9y ago

Those numbers are settlements, not transactions. Bitcoin has no transaction cap as most transactions can be moved off chain.

eosophos 9y ago
off chain how? wouldn't that compromise decentralization and censorship resistance?
- rothbardrand 9y ago
  Lightening network and side chains, are two of the technologies that do this, and neither compromise decentralization or censorship resistance or security. In fact, they enhance those qualities.
  - kobeya 9y ago
    To be clear, sidechain transactions are just transactions on another chain. I wouldn’t call that off chain as it actually introduces more transactions (to move across the peg).
    - rothbardrand 9y ago
      It's less transactions. Imagine you're paying your cable bill.. you can move some value to the side chain (one transaction) then make 12 monthly transactions-- on the side chain, so off the main chain--and then after cancelling move the balance back to the main chain (second transaction) Thus 14 transactions become 2.
      - kobeya 9y ago
        The amount of on chain transactions supported by a global mining network is fixed. You can’t just keep adding side chains or else you will run into the same scaling limits.
- kobeya 9y ago

XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago

The not so generally accepted answer for Bitcoin's low TPS is to use something called the lighting network. It's a way to lock up funds so you can tx with low fees and quick confirmations because you aren't hitting the main chain until you want to withdraw your funds. It's performing a wire transfer to venmo, once you do it you don't have to pay to move it around in venmo, except with the lighting network there is no counter party risk. If venmo gets hacked you don't lose your funds, they can't try and steal them, they can't prevent you from withdrawing. The technical details are, a bit hairy though.

XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago

Bitcoin is the access point to just about every other cryptocurrency. So if you want to buy most cryptocurrencies the path of least resistance (for most people) is to buy bitcoin and then buy something else. That of course doesn't say why someone would want to buy any cruptocurrency, but if you primary concern is the low TPS on Bitcoin and Ethereum then there's plenty of other options.

rothbardrand 9y ago

Bitcoins capacity is growing all the time, Segwit is a big jump, and MAST and other technologies will increase it further. Not to mention, we're about a year away from Lightening Networks being deployed into production, and he theoretical capacity of that is infinite, since it happens off chain. (LN will eventually be multiparty-- so you could get paid in your channel and then pay from your channel to various other receivers, though that capability may be more than a year off.) Further, segwit enables side chains so you can have bitcoin as a hub and any number of side chains with special purposes (including possibly very high transaction velocity) adding... with even less on chain load than lightening network, depending on how they are used. The tech is advancing rapidly, though it's highly involved and obscure to even most developers, so they propagandists are great at spreading FUD in favor of their particular choices. All of the above applies to Ethereum as well, to varying degrees of implementation.