4 ms·

> the network transaction volume is supposedly in the neighborhood with Visa ( something I find hard to believe.) I think the PR line is that PoS ETH can “scal

by cmckn 4y ago

> the network transaction volume is supposedly in the neighborhood with Visa ( something I find hard to believe.) I think the PR line is that PoS ETH can “scale to 100,000 TPS”, but it’s currently pushing 15-30 [1]. Visa does much more, though various figures are reported from 1,750 to 24,000. So, grains of salt and all that. [1] https://etherscan.io/ https://etherscan.io/

patriksvensson 4y ago
Correct, the plan is to scale to that level but currently is not doing that. The current L1 (Ethereum Mainnet) + L2 combined TPS can be seen here https://ethtps.info/ https://ethtps.info/ Important to note that Ethereum embraces the idea that L2's will provide a lot of the scale and L1 will remain the base, main layer of security. So the goal isn't for L1 to scale massively, but to be able to support a healthy ecosystem of secure L2's which scale in different ways!
DennisP 4y ago
It's a little more complicated than that. For one, Visa just does funds transfers. If Ethereum just transferred ETH, it could do 700 tx/sec, based on the gas limit per block divided by the 20K gas for a simple ETH transfer. A lot of Ethereum transactions are more complex and use more gas. Second, second-layer "rollups" already support transaction rates up to a couple thousand per second, without losing base-layer security guarantees. Essentially they compress the transactions on chain. (Actual traffic is much lower than that, so far.) The longer-term plan is to move to rollups in a big way, and add a form of data sharding to multiply the on-chain data storage. That's where the 100K/sec comes from.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > If Ethereum just transferred ETH, it could do 700 tx/sec So... Still an order of magnitude less than Visa. > A lot of Ethereum transactions are more complex and use more gas. How complex are they, are they a significant number, and dies this explain the abysmal transaction rates? Visa aside, on Singles Day AliPay does 1 to 1.5 billion transactions in one day. Okay. AliPay is an outlier. Klarna does about 2 million transactions per day, an average of 23 per second (it's significantly higher during peak hours, and lower during off-peak hours. Source: worked at Klarna). The transaction includes: client lookup (a complicated affair that differs from country to country and session to session), credit score calculation, order set up, payment (out of a several dozen different options) set up... all while conforming to banking and local regulations across 45 countries. Anything in eth anywhere close to that complexity-wise? > Second, second-layer "rollups" already support transaction rates up to a couple thousand per second So layer 2 batches transaction into a batch that then gets batched on layer 1 into a bugger batch that is then written in one go to the blockchain. Congrats, you've reinvented batch processing.
  - rafale 4y ago
    You are not making an effort to appreciate the opposite point if view. An order of magnitude for a young, decentralized, trustless and permissionless network is quite an engineering feat. How complex? -> Turing complete. Also there is more to L2s than batching. Their aim is to maintain the security guarantees of the L1 without sacrificing availability. Plus, Zk proofs and merkle trees allow for great data compression in the rollup.
    - dmitriid 4y ago
      > You are not making an effort to appreciate the opposite point if view. I stopped making an effort five-seven years ago for many obvious reasons. > How complex? -> Turing complete. Ah yes. Unlike every other system in the world that isn't? Turing completeness isn't a feat. It's such a trivial thing that people arrive at it by accident. Now the claim was "ethereum is abysmally slow because it runs complex things". What complex things are there that warrant this abysmal performance? > Also there is more to L2s than batching. Their aim is to maintain the security guarantees Yeah, yeah. It is batching for any intent and purpose. Do you really think batching in "traditional" systems is done without guarantees etc.?
      - imtringued 4y ago
        Turing completeness is actually amazing in its simplicity. You take a push down automata (finite state automata plus a stack) and then add the ability to read and write anywhere in the stack. The essence of Turing completeness is the ability to take any intermediate result as an input to the computation of the next result. This is why the halting problem is even a problem, because you need all of the intermediate results to know the end result. Ok now back to the topic at hand. Turing completeness on the L1 layer isn't very impressive because every node is supposed execute the code to validate it. The problem with L2 then is the fact that you must somehow avoid that, i.e. the L2 layer executes the smart contract and determines a result and these results are batched on the L1 where the point is that you're not supposed to execute the contract as otherwise there is no speedup to be gained. It is sort of a paradox. The end result has to be verified on chain. The most promising strategy so far is build a zkEVM which produces a zero knowledge proof that can be verified on L1 via a smart contract. I still don't understand how this convinces people to buy Ethereum. Money is supposed to be a medium of exchange because barter is expensive and time consuming. Instead of trading anything for anything we trade anything for money and money for anything. Competition is good but is Ethereum even competing? How exactly do random wealth transfers to early adopters serve any purpose that money is supposed to be used for according to classical text books?
lekevicius 4y ago
You are right, but a better place to follow progress is https://ethtps.info/ https://ethtps.info/. It shows TPS across all layer-2s. Current network demand doesn’t really require them, but after EIP-4844, “100 000 TPS” should be possible.

by cmckn 4y ago

patriksvensson 4y ago

Correct, the plan is to scale to that level but currently is not doing that. The current L1 (Ethereum Mainnet) + L2 combined TPS can be seen here https://ethtps.info/ https://ethtps.info/ Important to note that Ethereum embraces the idea that L2's will provide a lot of the scale and L1 will remain the base, main layer of security. So the goal isn't for L1 to scale massively, but to be able to support a healthy ecosystem of secure L2's which scale in different ways!

DennisP 4y ago

It's a little more complicated than that. For one, Visa just does funds transfers. If Ethereum just transferred ETH, it could do 700 tx/sec, based on the gas limit per block divided by the 20K gas for a simple ETH transfer. A lot of Ethereum transactions are more complex and use more gas. Second, second-layer "rollups" already support transaction rates up to a couple thousand per second, without losing base-layer security guarantees. Essentially they compress the transactions on chain. (Actual traffic is much lower than that, so far.) The longer-term plan is to move to rollups in a big way, and add a form of data sharding to multiply the on-chain data storage. That's where the 100K/sec comes from.

dmitriid 4y ago
> If Ethereum just transferred ETH, it could do 700 tx/sec So... Still an order of magnitude less than Visa. > A lot of Ethereum transactions are more complex and use more gas. How complex are they, are they a significant number, and dies this explain the abysmal transaction rates? Visa aside, on Singles Day AliPay does 1 to 1.5 billion transactions in one day. Okay. AliPay is an outlier. Klarna does about 2 million transactions per day, an average of 23 per second (it's significantly higher during peak hours, and lower during off-peak hours. Source: worked at Klarna). The transaction includes: client lookup (a complicated affair that differs from country to country and session to session), credit score calculation, order set up, payment (out of a several dozen different options) set up... all while conforming to banking and local regulations across 45 countries. Anything in eth anywhere close to that complexity-wise? > Second, second-layer "rollups" already support transaction rates up to a couple thousand per second So layer 2 batches transaction into a batch that then gets batched on layer 1 into a bugger batch that is then written in one go to the blockchain. Congrats, you've reinvented batch processing.
- rafale 4y ago
  You are not making an effort to appreciate the opposite point if view. An order of magnitude for a young, decentralized, trustless and permissionless network is quite an engineering feat. How complex? -> Turing complete. Also there is more to L2s than batching. Their aim is to maintain the security guarantees of the L1 without sacrificing availability. Plus, Zk proofs and merkle trees allow for great data compression in the rollup.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > You are not making an effort to appreciate the opposite point if view. I stopped making an effort five-seven years ago for many obvious reasons. > How complex? -> Turing complete. Ah yes. Unlike every other system in the world that isn't? Turing completeness isn't a feat. It's such a trivial thing that people arrive at it by accident. Now the claim was "ethereum is abysmally slow because it runs complex things". What complex things are there that warrant this abysmal performance? > Also there is more to L2s than batching. Their aim is to maintain the security guarantees Yeah, yeah. It is batching for any intent and purpose. Do you really think batching in "traditional" systems is done without guarantees etc.?
    - imtringued 4y ago
      Turing completeness is actually amazing in its simplicity. You take a push down automata (finite state automata plus a stack) and then add the ability to read and write anywhere in the stack. The essence of Turing completeness is the ability to take any intermediate result as an input to the computation of the next result. This is why the halting problem is even a problem, because you need all of the intermediate results to know the end result. Ok now back to the topic at hand. Turing completeness on the L1 layer isn't very impressive because every node is supposed execute the code to validate it. The problem with L2 then is the fact that you must somehow avoid that, i.e. the L2 layer executes the smart contract and determines a result and these results are batched on the L1 where the point is that you're not supposed to execute the contract as otherwise there is no speedup to be gained. It is sort of a paradox. The end result has to be verified on chain. The most promising strategy so far is build a zkEVM which produces a zero knowledge proof that can be verified on L1 via a smart contract. I still don't understand how this convinces people to buy Ethereum. Money is supposed to be a medium of exchange because barter is expensive and time consuming. Instead of trading anything for anything we trade anything for money and money for anything. Competition is good but is Ethereum even competing? How exactly do random wealth transfers to early adopters serve any purpose that money is supposed to be used for according to classical text books?

lekevicius 4y ago

You are right, but a better place to follow progress is https://ethtps.info/ https://ethtps.info/. It shows TPS across all layer-2s. Current network demand doesn’t really require them, but after EIP-4844, “100 000 TPS” should be possible.