5 ms·

Well, since bitcoin only supports a maximum of 3.5 transactions-per-second [1] we at least have an upper boundary on its excessive waste. 1. http://www.altcoin

Well, since bitcoin only supports a maximum of 3.5 transactions-per-second [1] we at least have an upper boundary on its excessive waste. 1. http://www.altcointoday.com/bitcoin-ethereum-vs-visa-paypal-transactions-per-second/ http://www.altcointoday.com/bitcoin-ethereum-vs-visa-paypal-...

BLanen 9y ago
That's not at all how it works... 3.5 Tx/s stays steady and the price increases the power it takes will only increase because miners will turn on more machines but due to increased difficulty will mine the same amount of bitcoins. A clear example of tragedy of the commons. Where the commons is new blocks. And the tragedy is the waste of electricity and labour.
peterisza 9y ago
Let me add here that Ripple doesn't have a traditional blockchain, sending money is essentially free compared to Bitcoin, and can handle up to 1000 transactions per second (https://ripple.com/dev-blog/ripple-consensus-ledger-can-sustain-1000-transactions-per-second/ https://ripple.com/dev-blog/ripple-consensus-ledger-can-sust...).
thisisit 9y ago
The upper boundary should be on the bitcoin difficulty and not tps. More difficulty = more hashes needed to mine 1 bitcoin = more machines added = more difficulty = more hashes....you get the idea.
imtringued 9y ago
The upperbound is the transactions fee + the mined blocks. Let's imagine someone makes a $1000 transaction with a $10 fee and a $10 block reward. This means a miner is at most willing to pay $20 worth of electricity to get that block. Increasing mining efficiency only gives you an an advantage over other miners. It does not increase the profit per watt because the difficulty will automatically rise until the desired interval between transactions has been reached. Increasing or decreasing the amount of transactions per block or interval does not directly change the energy consumption. Increasing the blocks per second by 10x means reducing the difficulty by 10x for each block but the total difficulty stays the same.
uncoder0 9y ago
The throughput is however not bounded by electricity usage. Increasing the block size 8x to 8MB would yield 28 tps and so on. 1GB blocks have even been tested and yield >10,000 tps at essentially the same electricity usage. https://news.bitcoin.com/gigablock-testnet-researchers-mine-the-worlds-first-1gb-block/ https://news.bitcoin.com/gigablock-testnet-researchers-mine-...

BLanen 9y ago

That's not at all how it works... 3.5 Tx/s stays steady and the price increases the power it takes will only increase because miners will turn on more machines but due to increased difficulty will mine the same amount of bitcoins. A clear example of tragedy of the commons. Where the commons is new blocks. And the tragedy is the waste of electricity and labour.

peterisza 9y ago

Let me add here that Ripple doesn't have a traditional blockchain, sending money is essentially free compared to Bitcoin, and can handle up to 1000 transactions per second (https://ripple.com/dev-blog/ripple-consensus-ledger-can-sustain-1000-transactions-per-second/ https://ripple.com/dev-blog/ripple-consensus-ledger-can-sust...).

thisisit 9y ago

The upper boundary should be on the bitcoin difficulty and not tps. More difficulty = more hashes needed to mine 1 bitcoin = more machines added = more difficulty = more hashes....you get the idea.

imtringued 9y ago

The upperbound is the transactions fee + the mined blocks. Let's imagine someone makes a $1000 transaction with a $10 fee and a $10 block reward. This means a miner is at most willing to pay $20 worth of electricity to get that block. Increasing mining efficiency only gives you an an advantage over other miners. It does not increase the profit per watt because the difficulty will automatically rise until the desired interval between transactions has been reached. Increasing or decreasing the amount of transactions per block or interval does not directly change the energy consumption. Increasing the blocks per second by 10x means reducing the difficulty by 10x for each block but the total difficulty stays the same.

uncoder0 9y ago

The throughput is however not bounded by electricity usage. Increasing the block size 8x to 8MB would yield 28 tps and so on. 1GB blocks have even been tested and yield >10,000 tps at essentially the same electricity usage. https://news.bitcoin.com/gigablock-testnet-researchers-mine-the-worlds-first-1gb-block/ https://news.bitcoin.com/gigablock-testnet-researchers-mine-...