Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Merits 4 from 3 users
Re: Bitcoin For Purchasing Goods and Services Mainstream>?
by
legiteum
on 23/04/2024, 13:55:39 UTC
⭐ Merited by ABCbits (2) ,Lucius (1) ,LoyceV (1)
The answer is absolutely not.

No blockchain system can come even close to handling mainstream loads, which would require transaction loads in the millions of transactions per second. Bitcoin is necessarily slow and expensive by design. You cannot have a decentralized system that is fast/cheap because it would be too easy to subvert (long long story short).

Only a fully centralized system--and even then, a very purpose-built, streamlined system--could manage this problem.

Here are the calculations as I wrote them up here a while back:

***

Let's start with the estimates of the number of credit card transactions there are on any given day, and extrapolate the peak volume per month, then per day, then per hour, then per second.

To keep the numbers easy, I'll just give you the very rounded numbers:

1. There are about two billion credit card transactions, world-wide, per day--if you average over the course of a whole year.

2. But some months, e.g. the holiday season, have much higher volume, so figure ten billion per day during those periods.

3. This comes to about 500m transactions per hour, but all of the hours in the day are not the same from the standpoint of purchase volume: there are peak shopping hours. Those hours can be 10x higher sometimes. So figure two billion transactions per hour during peak-peak periods.

4. Any internet-level system needs to account for a multiplied "peak second" volume, as the network can create holdups, which are then released like when you put your hand in front of a stream of water than then pull it away--and getting "behind" will cause a "traffic jam". Hence, figure a rate of about 10 billion transactions per hours to account for that, which comes to about 300k transactions per second.

5. So that's just credit cards, and that's just the volume we have today. But the vision here is extremely fast, extremely small, extremely cheap transactions that can be used even more broadly than credit cards: in other words, the vision is that someday humans will not use paper or metal currency at all, since we will have a system that cheap enough and fast enough to truly replace cash. Current estimates put the number of cash transactions at about 3x that of credit cards in developed countries. Hence you get to (again, heavily rounding here) to a level at about one million transactions per second.

So the "replace all current transactions" level of performance is about one million transactions per second, and for growth, to actually handle this problem, you need to imagine you could eventually end up at a multiple of that, e.g. millions of transactions per second.