[Cryptography] Blockchain scalability

[Jerry Leichter]

https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/03/canadian-banks-chinese-energy-company-to-use-ibms-blockchain-service/ describes an IBM offering of a blockchain implementation in the IBM cloud.  It's intended as a distributed ledger for various kinds of transactions, not to support a crypto-currency.  It's based on the Linux Foundation's Hyperledger Fabric, whose development IBM helped finance.

I found the following quote from an IBM press release of interest:  "Fabric is built for enterprise-level systems, and it can handle more than 1,000 transactions per second among large ecosystems of users".

A large number - but if you're serious about using blockchain to support a widely used crypto-currency, you've got a *long* way to go.  And keep in mind that this is within IBM's cloud, which has much better connectivity than the larger Internet.

                                                        -- Jerry