6 ms·

Here is the real world, Bitcoin is currently running a blazing 3.3 transactions per second. Etherium dwarfs that at a mighty 14 transactions per second. Meanw

• bourgwaletariat 5y ago
  How many transactions happen in the world?
  • ketzo 5y ago
    Visa says they do 150 million transactions in a day, for an average of 1,700tps — and I’d have to imagine their spikes are much higher.
    • newsbinator 5y ago
      Stellar (XLM) claims to be able to handle 4000tps, if I remember correctly?
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  • PeterisP 5y ago
    Looking solely at electronic direct payments, it would be more than a billion transactions per day, there are multiple major schemes that work on the 100m/day scale each (Visa, Mastercard, US ACH, EU SEPA, China Unionpay, etc) and a lot of smaller ones that add up. So that's in the ballpark of 10k sustained average txn/sec, more in peaks. On the other hand, there's room for a lot of growth, it's not even a single transaction per day for the almost 8 billion people that we have.
    • XorNot 5y ago
      Which is the core point: the major processors aren't being limited by their technology, they're being limited by the size of the economy. There's no real meaningful limit on how they can scale that. Just barely creeping across the line with crypto means its already inadequate.
  • CryptoPunk 5y ago
    Approximately 100,000 a second including cash transactions.
• pa7x1 5y ago
  Ethereum layer 1 is processing closer to 20 per second. In particular, it did 1716000 in the last 24 h. Ethereum's layer 2 can handle tens of thousands transactions per second. These are then settled on chain as a single transaction. There are multiple layer 2 solutions already working and more are coming. It's not a pipedream anymore they are live.
  • chromaton 5y ago
    How many transactions per day are currently being run on Ethereum layer 2? I can't find this info.
    • meowkit 5y ago
      Because layer 2 is nebulous. You’ll have to look up the transactions for each ERC20 token with volume. Volume is much higher than the base chain, but we are still waiting on rollups and sharding to supercharge TPS.
  • dboreham 5y ago
    "already working" hmm.
    • DennisP 5y ago
      Yes, they're called rollups and several are already in production on the public chain.
    • ButtSpark69 5y ago
      they're not lying. Loopring is one example among half a dozen. The issue is that current L2's are purpose-built by individual dapps. What doesn't currently exist (should be released in next few months) is the code that lets you copy/paste your current L1 code into an L2 code with almost no effort. At that point all the current dapps running on L1 can just port over to L2 very quickly and without the huge risk of a bug in a ton of new code lines.
      • 5y ago
• scotty79 5y ago
  Seriously? Bitcoin that has intentionally low transaction throuput is only two orders of magnitude slower than largest online payment processor that was designed with highest possible throuput in mind?
  • Qworg 5y ago
    VisaNet will do 76,000 tps - 4 orders of magnitude.
  • greenshackle2 5y ago
    It is based on usage statistics not a technical benchmark. That number is not their peak throughput capacity it's how many transactions they actually do, which I'd wager is bottle-necked by user adoption not by tech.
    • chromaton 5y ago
      Yes, let's wager on that.
• ChainOfFools 5y ago
  has anyone ever done the modeling on the dynamic limits of decentralized network consensus? my intuition has always been that getting, say, 100,000 globally distributed voting nodes to agree on even a simple truth value will quickly run into exponential (or worse) latency bottlenecks by way of metcalfe's law. the speed of light, as a hard limit, starts to become insurmountable when your consensus pathway has to be traversed the equivalent of tens of millions of km of signal path in order for every node to have an equal influence on the validity of every other node's vote. these high tps coins all seem to get around this by weakening decentralization, whether by shortening this path, either because they have far fewer nodes, or are deciding to sum over some approximation of node consensus by sampling or creating privileged paths, or because geography already creates privileged paths (all the nodes are in the same general area, or even in the same datacenter). I suspect the reason TX speed tends to stay mired in the tens per second region is that no amount of consensus accounting gimmickry will overcome the underlying physical limitations of true global scale decentralization of consensus.
  • Taek 5y ago
    Bitcoin's Proof of Work algorithm has linear scaling. Basically 100,000 nodes all trying to build consensus using Nakamoto PoW can do it in O(100,000) messages. The scaling factor on the number of miners is not what is a bottleneck here. The main bottleneck for cryptocurrencies is that every single node has to validate every single transaction. So your global throughput is effectively limited to what a single node can process. Technologies like STARKs can improve these bottlenecks without introducing new trust layers or trust assumptions but still carry data availability requirements which once again require every node to have all the data, even if they don't have to actually process all the data. There are additional techniques you can use to minimize the data availability impact but then you start introducing trust assumptions again. It's a tricky problem and there's a good reason none of the major chains have adopted a solution, but it's not as dire as your post suggests, nor does your post highlight any of the fundamental issues at play.
    • ChainOfFools 5y ago
      > The main bottleneck for cryptocurrencies is that every single node has to validate every single transaction. So your global throughput is effectively limited to what a single node can process literally what I said in my post. the mining aspect was your addition, not mine. I am describing an idealized model which doesn't even consider the added complication of mining to incentivise playing by the rules(let's assume coins are issued based on signs from, say, zeus). just simple consensus on a single 0/1 truth value. this is the hard scalability problem, and people claiming to fix it are ultimately bound to create hierarchies of truth authority, undermining decentralization and recreating the existing concentric power structure (with themselves in the center) they claim to obsolete.
• aeternum 5y ago
  Those are on-chain transactions. Coinbase and many other wallets now support offline, or 'Instant Sends' which is more akin to the simple database update that PayPal/Visa performs. Sure those aren't purely decentralized but a decentralized settlement layer is probably where most of the value is anyway.
  • chromaton 5y ago
    >a decentralized settlement layer is probably where most of the value is anyway. Why?
    • aeternum 5y ago
      Graph theory. A purely centralized topology has significant problems with fault tolerance, trust, and control. However you do not need a hyperconnected graph to achieve strong fault tolerance and protect against a single node with full control. The internet itself is a good example. It strikes a balance between decentralization and efficiency through the use of ISPs as supernodes.
  • jayd16 5y ago
    Why is that more novel than, say, intra-bank transactions?
    • tootahe45 5y ago
      You can't make a huge return holding USD. We just need to pretend this is real adoption to recruit more to the ponzi.
    • aeternum 5y ago
      Those intra-bank transactions that are still done via FTP, take 2-3 days to settle, and require owning a bank in order to participate? Yes, I suppose there's no room for improvement there.
  • Ar-Curunir 5y ago
    If I wanted that, I would be using something like Venmo, instead of Bitcoin.
• answertojob 5y ago
  check IOTA if you want to learn (if you have not) about DAG structure that potentially solves decentralized scalability. GOSSIP protocol
  • chromaton 5y ago
    I looked into this and IOTA requires special blessed "Coordinator" nodes, so it's not really decentralized.
    • answertojob 5y ago
      i want to elucidate my downvoters that I was not shilling the project. I was just pointing towards a network structure that you guys might find interesting given the problems we were discussing. I was not expecting to get some kind of reddit r/cryptocurrency style backlash. what you said is indeed true chromaton, but is also already solved and on its way to removing it this year. the theoretical solution to that was found in 2019 in one of their researchers conventions
      • chromaton 5y ago
        Fair enough. But I don't really buy anyone saying it's "on its way", as I've heard that one before. You can see a lot of "on its way" in this thread as well.
• ulzeraj 5y ago
  How many settlement layers exist between a PayPal transaction and the underlying money transfer protocol (SEPA, SWIFT etc)?
• billytetrud 5y ago
  Paypal isn't meaningfully decentralized. And Ethereum isn't sufficiently decentralized. Their throughput is part of what prevents Ethereum from being actually decentralized - pretty much no normal person can run a full ethereum node.