9 ms·

The thing is, in the wider cacophony of human civilization, Ethereum and cryptocurrencies also don't exist. If I and my grandma and everyone's grandma would us

by oblio 4y ago

The thing is, in the wider cacophony of human civilization, Ethereum and cryptocurrencies also don't exist. If I and my grandma and everyone's grandma would use Proof of Work cryptocurrencies to buy peanuts at the supermarket, PoW energy usage would probably rival that of China. Now it's just used for speculation by a bunch of rich folks, crooks and marks. Probably only a few thousand transactions per second, I imagine.

osrec 4y ago
Given that Visa does around 1,700 TPS, I imagine it's probably lower than that.
e1g 4y ago
“a few thousand transactions per second” is all of Visa+Mastercard. Bitcoin is just “a few” and ETH is barely “a dozen”. Edit: Sorry folks, that claim was based on outdated data! The latest figures for both Visa and Mastercard are ~5,000 transactions per second each.
- consp 4y ago
  On the busiest day of the year at peak hour here in the Netherlands the debit card transactions (creditcards are uncommon) reach just over 700/s. [Search for 'pin transacties per seconde' for news items covering this] Maybe around Christmas it will be in the 10k+
- azylman 4y ago
  I can pretty confidently say that all of Visa+Mastercard is way more than a few thousand transactions per second, I'm familiar with several companies that push hundreds of transactions per second through Visa+Mastercard and there's no way they're a significant portion of their business. This article claims Mastercard alone is 5k: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-lightning-network-vs-visa-and-mastercard-how-do-they-stack-up https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-lightning-network-vs-...
  - e1g 4y ago
    Capacity/peak vs average tps. Visa says they process "150 million transactions every day in 175 currencies" (see page 3 at https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visanet-technology/visa-net-booklet.pdf https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visan...). That's ~1,800 per second. Mastercard is smaller, so this would be the upper limit for them. Both combined should still fit into "a few thousand transactions per second".
    - azylman 4y ago
      That doc is from 2013, so it's pretty out of date.
      - e1g 4y ago
        True. The latest financial report from Visa [1] says 164.7B transactions in 2021, or ~5,000 per second. This number is 3x larger! Mastercard is slightly smaller, but comparable at 140B [2]. [1] https://annualreport.visa.com/financials/default.aspx https://annualreport.visa.com/financials/default.aspx [2] https://s25.q4cdn.com/479285134/files/doc_financials/2022/q2/2Q22-Mastercard-Supplemental-Operational-Performance-Data.pdf https://s25.q4cdn.com/479285134/files/doc_financials/2022/q2...
        azylman 4y ago
        Yup, that's a lot closer to the kind of numbers I would have expected. And if you look at peak it's probably at least 10k tps for each of them.
  - manquer 4y ago
    Imagine we can achieve that throughput with a single server without breaking a sweat![1]. The number of economic transactions all humans engage everyday including cash is perhaps 100x of that: so just in order of 500,000 TPS or less that feels quite small to be honest. [1] Yes these systems are complex and very distributed and have lot of checks and balances and the actual transactions apps and DBs are running on infra in hundreds or thousands of servers in DCs all around the world.
- oblio 4y ago
  I doubt that for credit cards. Carrefour or pick your favorite supermarket chain alone probably generate hundreds of transactions per second worldwide during peak periods, and there are tens of major supermarket chains you've never heard of. Add regular grocery stores, cinemas, etc, I'd be really interested in an order of magnitude, but at peak times it has to be in the tens of thousands if not low hundreds of thousands. For crypto I was trying to be super generous, I know they're incredibly slow.
  - cantSpellSober 4y ago
    > probably Do you have any information or just speculation?
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    The rate of customers served and the amount who use a credit card would filter those down to tiny numbers. A large coffee shop chain would crush any supermarket in volume.
- irusensei 4y ago
  Comparing visa and Mastercard transactions with Bitcoin is something that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Do people really think visa settles transactions between two different bank accounts? Those card transactions can take days to settle.
  - ThunderSizzle 4y ago
    As a user,this is a feature and a positive.
    - nybble41 4y ago
      Users include both buyers and sellers. Slow settlement and reversible transactions are a boon for buyers (and for fraudsters abusing chargebacks to get free stuff). For sellers they're a bit of a nightmare since you never know when money you thought you had been payed in good faith might disappear from your accounts with little or no recourse.
- DennisP 4y ago
  Zkrollups on Ethereum can do a couple thousand tx/sec, without security compromises. The plan now is to use the base layer mainly to support rollups, and use data sharding on the base layer to multiply the capacity of rollups. That should get it to about 100,000 tx/sec. That will be a pretty big change, but not as big as what they just did, and they've already got the design mostly worked out.
cantSpellSober 4y ago
> just used for speculation by a bunch of rich folks, crooks and marks Good try, but trite criticism regarding crypto is required to include the words "Ponzi" and "tulips". Let's try nuanced criticism please, crypto needs it. > Probably only a few thousand transactions per second, I imagine Quite an imagination! You're very far off, do you have any experience in this space?
- oblio 4y ago
  > Good try, but trite criticism regarding crypto is required to include the words "Ponzi" and "tulips" Thank you, I'm trying to come up with an "anti bullshit bingo" since the bullshit bingo from cryptocurrencies has already managed to raise tens of billions of dollars. Glad you like it. > Quite an imagination! You're very far off, do you have any experience in this space? I was trying to be generous since crypto supporters always like to point to the newest barely working bleeding edge centralized "layer" called lightning or thunderbolt or some other electricity derived thing, which is supposed to greatly accelerate the glacial rate of crypto transactions. Again, can I use crypto of any kind to buy $2 peanuts at the supermarket in Bucharest and grandma $1 popcorn at the cinema in Djibouti, without turning Earth into Venus?
  - capableweb 4y ago
    > Again, can I use crypto of any kind to buy $2 peanuts at the supermarket in Bucharest and grandma $1 popcorn at the cinema in Djibouti, without turning Earth into Venus? Probably not, but you can neither use USD (or any sort of dollar) for that either. In Bucharest you'd use Romanian leu (RON) and in Djibouti you'd use Djiboutian franc (DJF). It's all about finding people in the middle, to agree on what you both have. In this case, you wouldn't be able to buy anything in those locations.
  - MarkPNeyer 4y ago
    You can do both of these things in El Salvador right now.
  - cantSpellSober 4y ago
bitcoin_anon 4y ago
> If I and my grandma and everyone's grandma would use Proof of Work cryptocurrencies to buy peanuts at the supermarket, PoW energy usage would probably rival that of China. I can't speak for all PoW cryptocurrencies, but this is a common misunderstanding about Bitcoin. Energy usage does not scale with the number of users. The transactions per second is largely fixed due to the block size limit. If your grandma is using Bitcoin, she will probably be transacting on a second layer, e.g. Lightning or Coinbase.
- oblio 4y ago
  Is the second layer decentralized? A small number of large players does not make it decentralized.
  - gjs278 4y ago
  - manquer 4y ago
    Wealth always concentrates to few entities in all forms of free market capitalism. You cannot have decentralized money without distributed wealth that is not concentrated . This usually means a successful form of socialism ( none have proven successful, or looks likely to do so today) This merge to PoS is just exposing that people with wealth always have a say on how the system works, whether it is miners or stakers it was and is always controlled by few .
    - staringback 4y ago
      > This merge to PoS is just exposing that people with wealth always have a say on how the system works, whether it is miners or stakers it was and is always controlled by few . Miners nor stakers can decide how the system works, Ethereum does not have on-chain governance. 51% of miners/stakers can't just post invalid blocks crediting them with free money nor can they force anyone else's wallet to do anything that wasn't signed by the private key. The worst you can really do is refuse to include transactions in your blocks for as long as you are controlling the network, all it takes is one honest actor to include your transaction and it will finalize.
kodah 4y ago
Question from a non-crypto person. Why did you assert so plainly that Bitcoin scales linearly with transactions? Even I know that's not true. Things I'm curious about: - Where'd you learn this? - Have you read any academic material about Bitcoin? (eg: Bitcoin white paper, etc) - Why did you post five times on a thread about something you know very little about? Edit: it concerns me that people are so passionately posting misinformation on this post.
- anonporridge 4y ago
  Misinformation, both from proponents and opponents is the name of the game in crypto. It's incredibly difficult to find the truth from either side, especially if you're a lay person who doesn't have any grasp of how the technology works.
  - oblio 4y ago
    I can tell you as an opponent of cryptocurrencies. Experiments on social systems, currencies and stores of value should start small and work their way up OVER DECADES to tens and hundreds of thousands of people. Experimental stuff put into production, like Communism, can bring suffering for decades, if not centuries, to tens and hundreds of millions of people... billions, even. So if the proponents want to revolutionize the system immediately for a 5% efficiency improvement, especially since many of them have so MUCH MONEY AND POWER to gain from this revolution, be very, very SKEPTICAL. Frankly their odds to not be grifters or (smart) idiots are minuscule.
- helen___keller 4y ago
  in PoW, energy consumption scales linearly with the block reward value which is denominated in bitcoin thus scales with value of btc. Reward for mining is [ ( your hashrate / network hashrate) * block reward ]. so it's not usage that scales energy consumption, it's value of btc. Arguably though the two are intrinsically related (this should be obvious - if bitcoin somehow becomes the defacto global currency, a shitload of investment will pour in and bring its value much much higher) in truth it's a moot point. even with lightning protocol, bitcoin as a protocol couldn't handle that much capacity. If a few hundred million people just wanted to publish a single transaction (putting money in a wallet and thereafter doing everything on lightning protocol), it would take literally years to process that many transactions. Edit: just to be explicit, the reason energy consumption scales with block reward value is because it becomes very profitable to buy more mining equipment and mine more if the reward say doubles. It’s not an instant effect of course because there’s capital acquisition and operational capacity involved
anonporridge 4y ago
> If I and my grandma and everyone's grandma would use Proof of Work cryptocurrencies to buy peanuts at the supermarket Beyond your misconception that work scales with users rather than value, it's also a misconception that bitcoin is competing with technologies like Visa and Paypal. It's not supposed to be an alternative payment system. It's competing with gold and sovereign currencies. Your grandma won't ever use it directly. Your government might.
clarkmoody 4y ago
> If I and my grandma and everyone's grandma would use Proof of Work cryptocurrencies to buy peanuts at the supermarket, PoW energy usage would probably rival that of China. You don't understand how any of this works, do you?

by oblio 4y ago

osrec 4y ago

Given that Visa does around 1,700 TPS, I imagine it's probably lower than that.

e1g 4y ago

“a few thousand transactions per second” is all of Visa+Mastercard. Bitcoin is just “a few” and ETH is barely “a dozen”. Edit: Sorry folks, that claim was based on outdated data! The latest figures for both Visa and Mastercard are ~5,000 transactions per second each.

consp 4y ago
On the busiest day of the year at peak hour here in the Netherlands the debit card transactions (creditcards are uncommon) reach just over 700/s. [Search for 'pin transacties per seconde' for news items covering this] Maybe around Christmas it will be in the 10k+
azylman 4y ago
I can pretty confidently say that all of Visa+Mastercard is way more than a few thousand transactions per second, I'm familiar with several companies that push hundreds of transactions per second through Visa+Mastercard and there's no way they're a significant portion of their business. This article claims Mastercard alone is 5k: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-lightning-network-vs-visa-and-mastercard-how-do-they-stack-up https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-lightning-network-vs-...
- e1g 4y ago
  Capacity/peak vs average tps. Visa says they process "150 million transactions every day in 175 currencies" (see page 3 at https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visanet-technology/visa-net-booklet.pdf https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visan...). That's ~1,800 per second. Mastercard is smaller, so this would be the upper limit for them. Both combined should still fit into "a few thousand transactions per second".
  - azylman 4y ago
    That doc is from 2013, so it's pretty out of date.
    - e1g 4y ago
      True. The latest financial report from Visa [1] says 164.7B transactions in 2021, or ~5,000 per second. This number is 3x larger! Mastercard is slightly smaller, but comparable at 140B [2]. [1] https://annualreport.visa.com/financials/default.aspx https://annualreport.visa.com/financials/default.aspx [2] https://s25.q4cdn.com/479285134/files/doc_financials/2022/q2/2Q22-Mastercard-Supplemental-Operational-Performance-Data.pdf https://s25.q4cdn.com/479285134/files/doc_financials/2022/q2...
      - azylman 4y ago
        Yup, that's a lot closer to the kind of numbers I would have expected. And if you look at peak it's probably at least 10k tps for each of them.
- manquer 4y ago
  Imagine we can achieve that throughput with a single server without breaking a sweat![1]. The number of economic transactions all humans engage everyday including cash is perhaps 100x of that: so just in order of 500,000 TPS or less that feels quite small to be honest. [1] Yes these systems are complex and very distributed and have lot of checks and balances and the actual transactions apps and DBs are running on infra in hundreds or thousands of servers in DCs all around the world.
oblio 4y ago
I doubt that for credit cards. Carrefour or pick your favorite supermarket chain alone probably generate hundreds of transactions per second worldwide during peak periods, and there are tens of major supermarket chains you've never heard of. Add regular grocery stores, cinemas, etc, I'd be really interested in an order of magnitude, but at peak times it has to be in the tens of thousands if not low hundreds of thousands. For crypto I was trying to be super generous, I know they're incredibly slow.
- cantSpellSober 4y ago
  > probably Do you have any information or just speculation?
- ipaddr 4y ago
  The rate of customers served and the amount who use a credit card would filter those down to tiny numbers. A large coffee shop chain would crush any supermarket in volume.
irusensei 4y ago
Comparing visa and Mastercard transactions with Bitcoin is something that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Do people really think visa settles transactions between two different bank accounts? Those card transactions can take days to settle.
- ThunderSizzle 4y ago
  As a user,this is a feature and a positive.
  - nybble41 4y ago
    Users include both buyers and sellers. Slow settlement and reversible transactions are a boon for buyers (and for fraudsters abusing chargebacks to get free stuff). For sellers they're a bit of a nightmare since you never know when money you thought you had been payed in good faith might disappear from your accounts with little or no recourse.
DennisP 4y ago
Zkrollups on Ethereum can do a couple thousand tx/sec, without security compromises. The plan now is to use the base layer mainly to support rollups, and use data sharding on the base layer to multiply the capacity of rollups. That should get it to about 100,000 tx/sec. That will be a pretty big change, but not as big as what they just did, and they've already got the design mostly worked out.

cantSpellSober 4y ago

> just used for speculation by a bunch of rich folks, crooks and marks Good try, but trite criticism regarding crypto is required to include the words "Ponzi" and "tulips". Let's try nuanced criticism please, crypto needs it. > Probably only a few thousand transactions per second, I imagine Quite an imagination! You're very far off, do you have any experience in this space?

oblio 4y ago
> Good try, but trite criticism regarding crypto is required to include the words "Ponzi" and "tulips" Thank you, I'm trying to come up with an "anti bullshit bingo" since the bullshit bingo from cryptocurrencies has already managed to raise tens of billions of dollars. Glad you like it. > Quite an imagination! You're very far off, do you have any experience in this space? I was trying to be generous since crypto supporters always like to point to the newest barely working bleeding edge centralized "layer" called lightning or thunderbolt or some other electricity derived thing, which is supposed to greatly accelerate the glacial rate of crypto transactions. Again, can I use crypto of any kind to buy $2 peanuts at the supermarket in Bucharest and grandma $1 popcorn at the cinema in Djibouti, without turning Earth into Venus?
- capableweb 4y ago
  > Again, can I use crypto of any kind to buy $2 peanuts at the supermarket in Bucharest and grandma $1 popcorn at the cinema in Djibouti, without turning Earth into Venus? Probably not, but you can neither use USD (or any sort of dollar) for that either. In Bucharest you'd use Romanian leu (RON) and in Djibouti you'd use Djiboutian franc (DJF). It's all about finding people in the middle, to agree on what you both have. In this case, you wouldn't be able to buy anything in those locations.
- MarkPNeyer 4y ago
  You can do both of these things in El Salvador right now.
- cantSpellSober 4y ago

bitcoin_anon 4y ago

> If I and my grandma and everyone's grandma would use Proof of Work cryptocurrencies to buy peanuts at the supermarket, PoW energy usage would probably rival that of China. I can't speak for all PoW cryptocurrencies, but this is a common misunderstanding about Bitcoin. Energy usage does not scale with the number of users. The transactions per second is largely fixed due to the block size limit. If your grandma is using Bitcoin, she will probably be transacting on a second layer, e.g. Lightning or Coinbase.

oblio 4y ago
Is the second layer decentralized? A small number of large players does not make it decentralized.
- gjs278 4y ago
- manquer 4y ago
  Wealth always concentrates to few entities in all forms of free market capitalism. You cannot have decentralized money without distributed wealth that is not concentrated . This usually means a successful form of socialism ( none have proven successful, or looks likely to do so today) This merge to PoS is just exposing that people with wealth always have a say on how the system works, whether it is miners or stakers it was and is always controlled by few .
  - staringback 4y ago
    > This merge to PoS is just exposing that people with wealth always have a say on how the system works, whether it is miners or stakers it was and is always controlled by few . Miners nor stakers can decide how the system works, Ethereum does not have on-chain governance. 51% of miners/stakers can't just post invalid blocks crediting them with free money nor can they force anyone else's wallet to do anything that wasn't signed by the private key. The worst you can really do is refuse to include transactions in your blocks for as long as you are controlling the network, all it takes is one honest actor to include your transaction and it will finalize.

kodah 4y ago

Question from a non-crypto person. Why did you assert so plainly that Bitcoin scales linearly with transactions? Even I know that's not true. Things I'm curious about: - Where'd you learn this? - Have you read any academic material about Bitcoin? (eg: Bitcoin white paper, etc) - Why did you post five times on a thread about something you know very little about? Edit: it concerns me that people are so passionately posting misinformation on this post.

anonporridge 4y ago
Misinformation, both from proponents and opponents is the name of the game in crypto. It's incredibly difficult to find the truth from either side, especially if you're a lay person who doesn't have any grasp of how the technology works.
- oblio 4y ago
  I can tell you as an opponent of cryptocurrencies. Experiments on social systems, currencies and stores of value should start small and work their way up OVER DECADES to tens and hundreds of thousands of people. Experimental stuff put into production, like Communism, can bring suffering for decades, if not centuries, to tens and hundreds of millions of people... billions, even. So if the proponents want to revolutionize the system immediately for a 5% efficiency improvement, especially since many of them have so MUCH MONEY AND POWER to gain from this revolution, be very, very SKEPTICAL. Frankly their odds to not be grifters or (smart) idiots are minuscule.
helen___keller 4y ago
in PoW, energy consumption scales linearly with the block reward value which is denominated in bitcoin thus scales with value of btc. Reward for mining is [ ( your hashrate / network hashrate) * block reward ]. so it's not usage that scales energy consumption, it's value of btc. Arguably though the two are intrinsically related (this should be obvious - if bitcoin somehow becomes the defacto global currency, a shitload of investment will pour in and bring its value much much higher) in truth it's a moot point. even with lightning protocol, bitcoin as a protocol couldn't handle that much capacity. If a few hundred million people just wanted to publish a single transaction (putting money in a wallet and thereafter doing everything on lightning protocol), it would take literally years to process that many transactions. Edit: just to be explicit, the reason energy consumption scales with block reward value is because it becomes very profitable to buy more mining equipment and mine more if the reward say doubles. It’s not an instant effect of course because there’s capital acquisition and operational capacity involved

anonporridge 4y ago

> If I and my grandma and everyone's grandma would use Proof of Work cryptocurrencies to buy peanuts at the supermarket Beyond your misconception that work scales with users rather than value, it's also a misconception that bitcoin is competing with technologies like Visa and Paypal. It's not supposed to be an alternative payment system. It's competing with gold and sovereign currencies. Your grandma won't ever use it directly. Your government might.

clarkmoody 4y ago

> If I and my grandma and everyone's grandma would use Proof of Work cryptocurrencies to buy peanuts at the supermarket, PoW energy usage would probably rival that of China. You don't understand how any of this works, do you?