3 ms·

Bitcoin is slow as hell. So you can do an order of magnitude more with Ethereum than Bitcoin.

kang 9y ago
Technically, decentralized system will be always slower than centralized one. Its a good thing its slow. 1 hour blocks are even safer (and effectively we do convert blocktime to an hour by waiting for 6 confirmations). So no, you can't "do" more, only be more noisy.
- cturner 9y ago
  > Technically, decentralized system will be > always slower than centralized one. This is not a reasonable response to the parent: bitcoin is significantly slower than other systems of its class. Ethereum is an equivalent system and faster. (Others are much faster still) There are application where speed matters. For example, to sort things out while all the lawyers are in a room.
  - kang 9y ago
    I am not saying that speed doesn't matter; trade-off though is security. If there are lawyers to sort thing out, then you don't need crypto. >bitcoin is significantly slower than other systems of its class that class being decentralised proof-of-work, it is no slower than it is more secure than those class-members. (And among class members of equal 'speed' it is most secure)
  - xorcist 9y ago
    Ethereum slowed to a crawl as soon as people started trading kittens on it. And I remember seeing transaction fees in the hundreds of dollars when popular ICOs were happening. Which probably didn't help you if you were stuck on one of the exchanges which simply turned Ethereum processing off in times of high load. Not inspiring confidence in the statement that it is faster than other systems. Compared to Bitcoin it is off by a constant factor, and constant factors aren't really what we're interested in here. Storing an economy in a fully replicated global ledger has its limitations, there's no getting around that.
makomk 9y ago
The catch is that the Ethereum nodes are, I think, if anything even more resource-hungry than Bitcoin for an equivalent transaction load. So while right now Ethereum is processing substantially more transactions per second than Bitcoin, this demands an awful lot of resources from every node - not just disk space and CPU time, but IOPS and bandwidth too.

kang 9y ago

Technically, decentralized system will be always slower than centralized one. Its a good thing its slow. 1 hour blocks are even safer (and effectively we do convert blocktime to an hour by waiting for 6 confirmations). So no, you can't "do" more, only be more noisy.

cturner 9y ago
> Technically, decentralized system will be > always slower than centralized one. This is not a reasonable response to the parent: bitcoin is significantly slower than other systems of its class. Ethereum is an equivalent system and faster. (Others are much faster still) There are application where speed matters. For example, to sort things out while all the lawyers are in a room.
- kang 9y ago
  I am not saying that speed doesn't matter; trade-off though is security. If there are lawyers to sort thing out, then you don't need crypto. >bitcoin is significantly slower than other systems of its class that class being decentralised proof-of-work, it is no slower than it is more secure than those class-members. (And among class members of equal 'speed' it is most secure)
- xorcist 9y ago
  Ethereum slowed to a crawl as soon as people started trading kittens on it. And I remember seeing transaction fees in the hundreds of dollars when popular ICOs were happening. Which probably didn't help you if you were stuck on one of the exchanges which simply turned Ethereum processing off in times of high load. Not inspiring confidence in the statement that it is faster than other systems. Compared to Bitcoin it is off by a constant factor, and constant factors aren't really what we're interested in here. Storing an economy in a fully replicated global ledger has its limitations, there's no getting around that.

makomk 9y ago

The catch is that the Ethereum nodes are, I think, if anything even more resource-hungry than Bitcoin for an equivalent transaction load. So while right now Ethereum is processing substantially more transactions per second than Bitcoin, this demands an awful lot of resources from every node - not just disk space and CPU time, but IOPS and bandwidth too.