Author: Allen Piscitello 2015-01-31 02:58:51
Published on: 2015-01-31T02:58:51+00:00
The writer challenges the notion that on-chain transactions are the only way to use Bitcoin and scale it. They refer to an article in MIT's Tech Review, which states that during China's "Single's Day," Alipay handled up to 2.85 million transactions per minute, with 54 percent of its transactions made via mobile device. The writer questions the scalability of Bitcoin if it were to truly compete with worldwide financial services. They estimate that to handle 100,000 transactions per minute, a block size of about 1300x times larger than what we have now would be needed, which is bigger than a 1Gb block. The writer then calculates that if double the number of transactions Alipay can handle were included, there would be around 60 million transactions per block, which would require around 15 gigabytes per block to be broadcast and hashed by all the full nodes every ten minutes. This would eat up good 2TB of storage daily, leading the writer to question whether miners have enough bandwidth and CPU power to handle this. Finally, they wonder if their scalability concerns are absurd and provide their Twitter handle for further discussion.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T16:00:43.021879+00:00