My concerns come from 2 projects that could easily raise the current transaction volume 10x daily in the short term,  perhaps even 100x a year from now after the media blows it out.

Think legal bittorrent file sales: ebooks, indie music (albums and singles), films, art, stock photography.

Think p2p amazon (OpenBazaar) and how that could grow exponentially in terms of transactional volume when ecommerce penetrates geos currently underserved.

Thanks for your explanations. it seems as of now we must rely on the likes of centralized solutions like Bitpay, Coinbase to manage the transactional volume we expect, or just wait for the technology to be ready finally handle it in a real p2p fashion, no intermediaries.



On Sat, Jan 31, 2015, 6:04 PM Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net> wrote:
"Alipay handled up to 2.85 million transactions per minute, and 54 percent of its transactions are made via mobile device."

I know China is a very big place but even so - 47,500 transactions per second would be almost quintiple what Visa handles across the entire world. With only 300 million users and primarily online usage (?) this claim feels a little suspect to me.

Given the wording "up to 2.85 million" I wonder if that is some freak spike caused by people's behaviour being synchronised externally (e.g. a fixed start time for the sale that people are waiting for). It's hard to imagine that they sustained anything close to that for the entire day.

So this is really a discussion about peak performance.

If you average every transaction around 250 bytes, then you'd need ~15 Gigabytes per block to be broadcast and hashed by all the full nodes every 10 minutes, eating good 2Tb of storage daily... do miners have enough bandwidth and CPU power to handle this? 

There's a discussion of such things here that might be useful:


It discusses various optimisations, like not actually sending tx data twice.

I wouldn't worry about it too much. It took decades for Visa to even approach 10,000 txns/sec. PayPal, I believe, still "only" handles a few hundred. And those services had the benefits of minimal competition, working in people's local currencies, integrated dispute mediation and not representing any real threat to the political status quo. Bitcoin isn't going to be needing to handle Alipay's level of traffic any time soon. 

Frankly, scaling is a nice problem to have, it means you're popular. It'd be a mistake to just blindly assume Bitcoin will take over the world. Growing market share is difficult. Worry more about how to get 300 million crazy users than the precise broadcast protocol that'd be needed to handle them ;)