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Comment by deegles | Hacker News Reader

Nope, that's a low end estimate of writes.

"Every 60 seconds on Facebook: 510,000 comments are posted, 293,000 statuses are updated, and 136,000 photos are uploaded."

https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/amp...

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Most of those writes don't need to be serialized transactions. Other p2p data structures like CRDTs and torrents are sufficient for posting comments and uploading photos; see the decentralized social network Patchwork[1] (based on scuttlebutt[2]).

The blockchain itself will only be needed for certain types of transactions, for instance those around identity (e.g. name registration), and reputation/spam prevention (forum moderators).

1. https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork 2. https://github.com/dominictarr/scuttlebutt

(510000 + 293000 + 136000) / 60 is about 15.5k, so slightly less than the estimate in this article, although you are right that I was overstating the amount of traffic that is read only.

Yes, but that's not counting things like post likes, FB Messenger, check-ins, account creations, profile edits, logging and statistics, etc etc. I wouldn't be surprised if they're in the millions of writes per second.

In a recent submission [0] they give some stats about their abuse system and at ~47:35 they mention this system gets 1M requests per seconds, which doesn't have to precisely coincide with write volume but suggests it's in the right ballpark.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14624802

[1] http://events.techcast.com/bigtechday10/Garmisch-1345/

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