3 ms·
Also the network is far too slow to handle even a fraction of the day to day transactions handled by VISA. Even if you relegate it to more substantial transfers
by rtkwe 4y ago
Also the network is far too slow to handle even a fraction of the day to day transactions handled by VISA. Even if you relegate it to more substantial transfers SWIFT handles around 35 million transfers per day and for the whole month of October this year the main chain only handled 7.9 millionish from what I can find. It's so slow there's a whole opaque secondary layer that had to be built to get it even close to potentially handling day to day transactions.
- littlestymaar 4y agoTrue, but if you think about the initial goal of a decentralized payment method over the internet and not in a crypto-maximalist perspective, it doesn't necessarily make sense to compare it with VISA or Swift which mostly process payments IRL. When bitcoin was designed, its throughput was a significant fraction of Paypal's which doesn't sound so bad. In fact, having a decentralized, uncensorable and open-source payment system taking 20% of Paypal's market share would have been a major success regarding Satoshi's stated goals, and this was something achievable even with the slow network. But it never happened, and all we have instead is this gigantic VC-funded distributed Casino where hackers and fraudsters thrive.
- rtkwe 4y agoThe inherent problem there is the capacity is essentially fixed without a protocol change causing a hard fork. That's a doomed service in the long run.