[Cryptography] Electronic currency revived after 20-year hiatus

[Peter Todd]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 03:59:46PM -0700, Tony Arcieri wrote:
> 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)

There's a third that may work:

    Find a way to shard the state associated with decentralized blockchains such
    that miners can meaningfully participate without having the entire state, and
    users can meaningfully validate without having the entire state.

My Treechains work is an (incomplete) attempt at that.

-- 
https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
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