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by etr-strike 3115 days ago
I hate to break it to you but none of the existing cryptocurrencies know how to scale transactions yet. There are, however, many proposed solutions. Bitcoin is aggressively pursuing those solutions.

The worst proposal, increasing blocksize, is not currently being considered because of its impact on centralization.

2 comments

Have you heard of bitcoin's lightning network? There is a layer they're working on that, as I've heard it, allows 1 million transactions a second for a fraction of the transaction cost. It's not VISA, but it's a huge improvement, and makes Bitcoin much more viable. They've been showcasing successful tests, but are open about it not being 100% ready. Still exciting.
Lightning doesn't scale with users. It can handle 1 million transactions between 2 people in seconds, but 2 transactions between a million people would take weeks.
>The worst proposal, increasing blocksize, is not currently being considered because of its impact on centralization.

Hard drive space is cheap! Increasing blocksize isn't going to cause centralization, it's the easiest and most effective way to scale for now.

It's not just hard drive space. A CPU is needed to verify the contents of the block (and, in ethereum's case, validate the results of any smart contracts). Increasing blocksize also increases validation time. In some cases, the validation times don't scale linearly with size.