Re: [Bitcoin-development] Is there a way to estimate the maximum number of transactions per minute Bitcoin can handle as it is today?

[Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net>]

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>
> "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:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

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 ;)

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