Author: David Vorick 2017-03-31 18:23:00
Published on: 2017-03-31T18:23:00+00:00
Scaling Bitcoin to handle massive amounts of transactions poses significant challenges and requires expensive solutions. At 400B transactions per year, block sizes would reach 4.5 GB and require petabytes of database storage. Processing blocks of that size requires an enormous amount of RAM that cannot fit into a single machine, necessitating a computer cluster. However, clusters are more expensive per-resource due to the need for synchronization and redundancies. Additionally, peak transaction volumes can be up to 50 times higher than typical volumes, requiring clusters to handle up to 500k transactions per second. Maintaining such a system requires experts to manage it, including dealing with frequent disk failures and rebuilding without taking the system offline. Moreover, transaction processing is largely non-parallel, requiring synchronization to check each transaction against each other transaction to ensure no double-spending occurs. As scalability problems arise, cost structures become a key issue. Systems operating at such scales typically have cost structures in the seven-digit range, as seen in the data centers that process airline tickets, costing over $5 million per year for larger airlines. Visa's cost structure is likely even more expensive. Therefore, scaling Bitcoin to handle massive amounts of transactions requires significant investments in hardware, expertise, and maintenance.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T22:40:23.882289+00:00