Author: Angel Leon 2015-01-31 00:48:40
Published on: 2015-01-31T00:48:40+00:00
On China's "Single's Day", Alipay handled up to 2.85 million transactions per minute with 54% of its transactions made via mobile device, indicating the scalability of financial services in China. In comparison, Bitcoin's block chain averages about 73 transactions per minute, raising concerns over its scalability if it were to compete with worldwide financial services. The author estimated that a block size of about 1300x larger than what is currently in use would be required to handle 100,000 transactions per minute. However, if Bitcoin were to handle double the number of transactions Alipay can handle, around 60 million transactions per block would be required, which would translate to 15 Gigabytes per block broadcast and hashed by all full nodes every 10 minutes, consuming 2Tb storage daily. This raises questions about whether miners have enough bandwidth and CPU power to handle such a massive workload and whether current scalability concerns are justified.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T16:00:29.249034+00:00