[Cryptography] What is total world transaction volume?

[John Levine]

>What is the total number of credit and debit card transactions, 
>including atm transactions, per unit time?

A 2012 report from the Fed had these numbers for 2012, all in billions:

26 credit card
47 debit card
 9 prepaid card
22 ACH (electronic bank transfer)
18 paper checks

The average value of plastic transactions is under $100, of ACH about
$2000 and paper checks about $1000.

>How many transactions would a crypto currency need to handle per unit 
>time to replace government money?

Add those together and the total is upwards of 100 billion per year,
which is between 3 and 4 thousand per second.  There are obviously
more transactions during the day when people are awake, and a lot of
seasonal variation, like between Thanksgiving and Christmas, so as a
rough estimate you'd need to handle 10,000 per second just to keep up,
not even counting the transactions now done with physical cash.

For anyone who didn't get the memo, Bitcoin is a toy-sized prototype.

That's just the US; there's more people in Europe so I expect they
have at least as many transactions as we do.  China and India have
vast numbers of people and vast numbers of transactions, in India at
least they are mostly in physical cash.

Not to reignite an argument, but I would note that most people
consider it a feature, not a bug, that it's possible to reverse
fraudulent plastic transactions.  So Bitcoin is really only a
substitute for the much smaller number of transactions currently
handled with envelopes full of cash.

R's,
John