The numbers being sorted in Bead Sort are base 1, which means it's never faster than O[n] where n is not the number of numbers being sorted, but the largest num

The numbers being sorted in Bead Sort are base 1, which means it's never faster than O[n] where n is not the number of numbers being sorted, but the largest number being sorted. That means it won't scale well and is impractical for sorting realistic numbers (barring a lot of special-purpose parallel hardware).