[aback]

The cost to secure the system is orthogonal to the cost of processing transactions and rises and lowers proportional to coin price, providing a level of security commensurate with the market value of the thing secured.

The cost per transaction is simply a function of the rate limiter that is attached to Bitcoin. Bitcoin could secure many more transactions per second if the rate limiter was removed.

> a measly 100k transactions

As I type this the network is averaging ~12000 txns per hour, or 288,000 per day, FWIW.

[afreak]

12,000 transactions per hour translates to 200 transactions per minute or 3 per second. However, you're being generous here because what you're suggesting is what it currently does at best, when in reality it is anywhere between 1 and 3 transactions per second, meaning that it is doing anything between 86,400 and 288,000 per day--that's a large spread.

Visa claims it can do 2,000 transactions per second or 172,800,000 per day and Paypal suggests its maximum is 115 per second or 9,936,000 total per day [1]. At best, Bitcoin is able to handle 3% of the volume that Paypal is able to and it doesn't even register as a blip when compared to a single major credit card.

If we continue to read the link I cited for those numbers, we get these details:

>Let's assume an average rate of 2000tps, so just VISA. Transactions vary in size from about 0.2 kilobytes to over 1 kilobyte, but it's averaging half a kilobyte today.

>That means that you need to keep up with around 8 megabits/second of transaction data (2000tps * 512 bytes) / 1024 bytes in a kilobyte / 1024 kilobytes in a megabyte = 0.97 megabytes per second * 8 = 7.8 megabits/second.

>This sort of bandwidth is already common for even residential connections today, and is certainly at the low end of what colocation providers would expect to provide you with.

If we were to expect that everyone was to get onboard the blockchain, we would have to assume that we're all going to start sucking up 0.97 MB per second, or about 82 GB a day. This would mean that in a month, one would use just about 2.5 TB of bandwidth. If the average residential user were to want to transfer 2.5 TB for just a blockchain (ignoring modern life's pleasures like Netflix and other streaming services), you'd have to find an Internet service that would not impose a usage cap. As it stands with Comcast, if you exceed 300 GB, you'll get charged $10 USD for every 50 GB you use [2], meaning that a month's worth of transactions will cost you just about $450 on top of what you already pay for the privilege of having access to a blockchain.

This doesn't even take into account that transactions are replayed once confirmed so those numbers could end up even higher if the whole protocol isn't changed. Heck, I am not even taking storage into account which is a different problem all together.

The idea that blockchains are going to be the future is pure lunacy. It's either going to be limited to data centres that can handle this load or it's not going to be used at all. It has no future for the general public and is part of the reason why Bitcoin in itself is not practical.

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability - Bitcoin's "official" wiki backs this up

[2] https://bgr.com/2015/11/19/comcast-data-cap-2015-bad-for-us-...

[aback]

First off, the numbers I cited were not theoretical, they were the observed network run rate at the time I posted.

Secondly, Bitcoin doesn't have to scale up to Visa levels, at least not in 2016. In 2016, it just has to scale up. And there's plenty of room to scale up.

Bitcoin has a growth plan that subsidizes the expansion of the network (via inflation and adoption) for many more decades. In two decades, the Moore's Law equivalent of a 1MB block size is a 16GB block size. Even without additional scalability, Bitcoin can process a lot of transactions with 16GB blocks.