[Cryptography] Electronic currency revived after 20-year hiatus

[Tony Arcieri]

On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 4:49 PM, Allen <allenpmd at gmail.com> wrote:

> Blockchains that can handle 20 billion transaction a day will be here
> within a year.
>

The largest number I've seen quoted by a blockchain system (Tendermint) is
10,000 transactions per second in a simulated benchmark on EC2.

That's 864,000,000 transactions per day, or about 2 orders of magnitude
lower than your quoted number of 20 billion.

20 billion is, in fact, an order of magnitude higher than VISAnet's claimed
capacity:

http://visatechmatters.tumblr.com/post/96025603185/put-to-the-stress-test-visanet-gets-pushed-to-the

Meanwhile, Bitcoin's present maximum theoretical transaction rate
(pre-SegWit) is closer to slightly less than 1 million ("on-chain")
transactions per day.

There are only two strategies that will work:

   - Move more payments off-chain (e.g. payment channels, Lightning,
   Thunder)
   - More ledgers/payment networks, and a protocol to interconnect them
   (pegged sidechains, Interledger)

A single, centralized ledger system is a flawed strategy.

--
Tony Arcieri
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