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An analysis of Bitcoin's throughput bottlenecks

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Re: An analysis of Bitcoin's throughput bottlenecks

#41
post #31

Bitcoin dominance is fading this year only because it has bet on LN with fundamental inbound capacity problem. LN rejected my proposal to solve it and extend channels with credit lines: XLN https://medium.com/fairlayer/xln-extended-lightning-network-...

Bitcoin dominance always goes down in altcoin season and then comes right back up.

Re: An analysis of Bitcoin's throughput bottlenecks

#42
post #18

Here is the real world, Bitcoin is currently running a blazing 3.3 transactions per second. Etherium dwarfs that at a mighty 14 transactions per second. Meanwhile, PayPal crawls along with a pathetic 488 tps. https://www.statista.com/statistics/730838/number-of-daily-c... https://www.businessofapps.com/data/paypal-statistics/

Ethereum layer 1 is processing closer to 20 per second. In particular, it did 1716000 in the last 24 h. Ethereum's layer 2 can handle tens of thousands transactions per second. These are then settled on chain as a single transaction. There are multiple layer 2 solutions already working and more are coming. It's not a pipedream anymore they are live.

How many transactions per day are currently being run on Ethereum layer 2? I can't find this info.

Re: An analysis of Bitcoin's throughput bottlenecks

#43
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lower transaction throuput,the higher the fees, the higher the incentive for the miners to process transactions. They probably don't want to mess with that dynamic too harshly.

this was the debate circa 2014/2015. Should the bitcoin network consist of many low fee transactions or few high fee transactions. Right now the incentive for miners to secure the network is produced with the block reward, but when the block reward runs out this incentive will be from fees alone. In order to provide miners with the same revenue as today when the block reward runs out, the average fee per tx will need…

Why many low fee transactions were not chosen?

Re: An analysis of Bitcoin's throughput bottlenecks

#44
post #20

> I will also show that while Bitcoin currently may not be in a safe state, future software optimizations could allow Bitcoin safely process likely more than 100 transactions/second on today's hardware. 100 transactions/second still doesn’t sound like a lot, especially if you want Bitcoin to be an actual currency used for exchange of goods.

In some senses it's not a lot, in other senses it is a lot. Large systems (like the US banking system) only do a few intra-bank settlements per day, 100 tps is well beyond what you need for nation states to do business with eachother. And then down at the consumer level it's nothing at all. During peak hours of the peak season (Christmas), Visa does something like 50,000 tps. What makes Bitcoin interesting is the tru…

This is a great way to put it. If you look at settlement times 3tps is great. If you’re actively transacting as a consumer then that won’t cut it.

Re: An analysis of Bitcoin's throughput bottlenecks

#45
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any cryptocurrencies that are attempting to solve this issue?

Basically all (hardly even an exaggeration!) other cryptocurrencies are attempting to improve upon the throughput issue. Solana is a particularly prominent one with 50k/s https://solana.com/

I looked into it and Solana requires "Validator" nodes to be specially blessed by them to get rewards for running their software, so this isn't particularly de-centralized.

Re: An analysis of Bitcoin's throughput bottlenecks

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically all (hardly even an exaggeration!) other cryptocurrencies are attempting to improve upon the throughput issue. Solana is a particularly prominent one with 50k/s https://solana.com/

I looked into it and Solana requires "Validator" nodes to be specially blessed by them to get rewards for running their software, so this isn't particularly de-centralized.

[deleted]

Re: An analysis of Bitcoin's throughput bottlenecks

#47

Here is the real world, Bitcoin is currently running a blazing 3.3 transactions per second. Etherium dwarfs that at a mighty 14 transactions per second. Meanwhile, PayPal crawls along with a pathetic 488 tps. https://www.statista.com/statistics/730838/number-of-daily-c... https://www.businessofapps.com/data/paypal-statistics/

check IOTA if you want to learn (if you have not) about DAG structure that potentially solves decentralized scalability. GOSSIP protocol

I looked into this and IOTA requires special blessed "Coordinator" nodes, so it's not really decentralized.

Re: An analysis of Bitcoin's throughput bottlenecks

#48

Here is the real world, Bitcoin is currently running a blazing 3.3 transactions per second. Etherium dwarfs that at a mighty 14 transactions per second. Meanwhile, PayPal crawls along with a pathetic 488 tps. https://www.statista.com/statistics/730838/number-of-daily-c... https://www.businessofapps.com/data/paypal-statistics/

How many transactions happen in the world?

Looking solely at electronic direct payments, it would be more than a billion transactions per day, there are multiple major schemes that work on the 100m/day scale each (Visa, Mastercard, US ACH, EU SEPA, China Unionpay, etc) and a lot of smaller ones that add up. So that's in the ballpark of 10k sustained average txn/sec, more in peaks.

On the other hand, there's room for a lot of growth, it's not even a single transaction per day for the almost 8 billion people that we have.

Re: An analysis of Bitcoin's throughput bottlenecks

#49
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this was the debate circa 2014/2015. Should the bitcoin network consist of many low fee transactions or few high fee transactions. Right now the incentive for miners to secure the network is produced with the block reward, but when the block reward runs out this incentive will be from fees alone. In order to provide miners with the same revenue as today when the block reward runs out, the average fee per tx will need…

Why many low fee transactions were not chosen?

You'll get many different responses to this question depending on who you ask. If you want to read into further i recommend you read the great scaling debate[1]. Its pretty long but does a fantastic job of summarizing the history.

In short the most popular reason for not having a block size increase (to allow many low fee transactions) was that it would increase the cost of running a full node, in turn centralising the network. More transactions would mean nodes would need a bigger hard drive and a better cpu to process the transactions. The small block camp wanted people to be able to run nodes on a raspberry pi. This theory is misguided in my opinion though, they chose to sacrifice cheap transactions to keep node running costs cheap.

[1]https://medium.com/hackernoon/the-great-bitcoin-scaling-deba...

Re: An analysis of Bitcoin's throughput bottlenecks

#50
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

has anyone ever done the modeling on the dynamic limits of decentralized network consensus? my intuition has always been that getting, say, 100,000 globally distributed voting nodes to agree on even a simple truth value will quickly run into exponential (or worse) latency bottlenecks by way of metcalfe's law. the speed of light, as a hard limit, starts to become insurmountable when your consensus pathway has to be tr…

Bitcoin's Proof of Work algorithm has linear scaling. Basically 100,000 nodes all trying to build consensus using Nakamoto PoW can do it in O(100,000) messages. The scaling factor on the number of miners is not what is a bottleneck here. The main bottleneck for cryptocurrencies is that every single node has to validate every single transaction. So your global throughput is effectively limited to what a single node ca…

> The main bottleneck for cryptocurrencies is that every single node has to validate every single transaction. So your global throughput is effectively limited to what a single node can process

literally what I said in my post. the mining aspect was your addition, not mine. I am describing an idealized model which doesn't even consider the added complication of mining to incentivise playing by the rules(let's assume coins are issued based on signs from, say, zeus). just simple consensus on a single 0/1 truth value.

this is the hard scalability problem, and people claiming to fix it are ultimately bound to create hierarchies of truth authority, undermining decentralization and recreating the existing concentric power structure (with themselves in the center) they claim to obsolete.

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