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by gizmo686 3095 days ago
Lets say a bitcoin transaction takes 250 bytes on average. Visa processes 24,000 transactions per second. To scale to this level, the bitcoin blockchain would need to grow at a rate of about 5.7mb/s. This is a blocksize of about 3.3 gigabytes.

Growing the blocksize is not a sustainable way to scale bitcoin. This is why people are saying that Bitcoin is still not a mature technology; the problems associated with scaling it are still unsolved problems of computer science.
3 comments
CyberDildonics 3095 days ago
First, the 24,000 /s is the maximum throughput. The real number from visa themselves is about 2,000.

Second, the Bitcoin unlimited team has already tested and demonstrated gigabyte blocks. That would be about 1.6MB per second. This is already achievable with a $12 per month VPS, far less than a single btc transaction.

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gizmo686 3095 days ago
Cool project. I found this [0] talk on the matter.

I am still working through it, but it seems that with (somewhat optimized) current software they hit 10 minute propagation time at 1GB blocksize, with about 500tx/s (t=4549).

EDIT: This experient is also still young. As of the November 2017 talk I linked, they were using 4-6 miner nodes, and a UTXO pool simmilar to the current network (to the point where the presented would not even give numbers for memory and disk IO because he viewed them as not relevent to what would really be seen).

I submitted the linked talk to HN. Comments at [1]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDF8bOEqXt4&feature=youtu.be...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16012746

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anonymous5133 3095 days ago
Still, scaling by block size increase is still a legitimate way to scale. Right now we don't need visa level scaling. We simply need a little more room to keep transaction fees at a reasonable level. Luckily we have bitcoin cash that we can use that has higher capacity.
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notsrg 3095 days ago
Luckily you could use literally any other cryptocurrency that anyone isn't using to get fast tx's and low fees.
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monort 3094 days ago
6 MB/s is trivial for cheap servers and doable for a lot of personal connections (outside US) right now, you shouldn't even wait for Moore's law to catch up.

In 2016 Visa made 86 billion transactions, that is average of ~2600 per second, one magnitude less, than you expected.

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