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Comment by DennisP | Hacker News Reader

Which coins with high transaction levels do you mean?

I'm not aware of other fully-public blockchains that have comparably high levels, though maybe I'm missing something. With permissioned chains it's much easier to reach high throughput.

The so-called mixer has been debunked here before. It actually looks like exchanges, and the temporary addresses they generate for deposits. That does mean that a large portion of transactions are with exchanges, but that shouldn't surprise anyone, and would be the same on Bitcoin.

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The IOTA network sustained >1.1 million TX over the last 24h as well (a bit more because there's a gap in my stats) - most without value however.

The selection of protocols is indeed quite selective.

Disclaimer: I work on IOTA.

Not really comparable, since IOTA is centralized in its current form.

And since they're value-less transactions, essentially unrewarded mining activity.

The commenter you replied to asked for public blockchains. Until the coordinator is turned off IOTA is a permissioned blockchain.

IOTA doesn't have a blockchain, its a DAG.

How’s the work on Iota going?

Are we anywhere near close enough to get rid of the centralization?

I’m really excited about the project

Lots to do and hard to find talented hands to work on things. But great overall - both on seeing adoption in real world use cases and development side.

As for the other question: once the network is more - next year?

>I'm not aware of other fully-public blockchains that have comparably high levels, though maybe I'm missing something. With permissioned chains it's much easier to reach high throughput.

but the title says "Ethereum Now Handles More Transactions Than All Digital Currencies Combined". note "Digital Currencies", not "blockchain currencies".

It was a reply to "1) They've conveniently ignored many crypto coins with high transaction levels" though.

XRP would be one, Tuesday's transaction count was 951,163: https://xrpcharts.ripple.com/#/metrics

Is it really a cryptocurrency though? It seems more like a paypal alternative (i.e. the ripple foundation can roll back any transaction at will and has done so in the past)

> has done so in the past

Which?

In all fairness, so has the Ethereum Foundation with the DAO and the latest Parity hack is not unlikely to be next.

The difference is that the DAO hardfork was not done by the Ethereum Foundation. It was recommended by the Ethereum Foundation and the actually done by the vast majority of miners, in consensus.

No, seriously; which transactions were reversed? I'm unaware of any such thing occurring on the network.

The construction of the network/consensus protocol means that Ripple would have to get a majority of all validators on the majority of everyone's UNLs to lie to reverse a transaction. Ripple likely does not have such influence /or/ if they do, then you are free to select a larger UNL set, along with the rest of the community, such that they /do not/.

Ripple is a permissioned blockchain.

I don't think it is a blockchain. Google ripple consensus protocol.

It is a Merkle DAG of transactions secured by cryptographic protocols. It very much is a blockchain -- it just doesn't use proof of work as a mechanism to exclude bad actors. The fact that it uses UNLs and consensus to achieve a consistent view of valid transactions does not make Ripple "not a blockchain" and, as XRP relies on cryptographic mechanisms to secure rights of ownership on that blockchain, XRP, the native Ripple asset, is by definition a cryptocurrency in the colloquial sense.

And transaction value is a very different thing from the number of transactions. In this case, that exchange system has been estimated to be doing about 10% of the total number of transactions, not 68%

BitShares and Steem, for example : http://blocktivity.info/

BitShares and Steemit are both highly centralized. Their architecture is very similar to a traditional server client set up: they have a small number of trusted nodes, and non validating clients that depend on them.

And the transactions in Steemit at least are generally very low value, with 1-cent upvotes and article/comment entries making up the bulk of them. In comparison, the average value of an Ethereum transaction is $10,000.

Centralized or not, they are still digital currency, or crypto coins, both use a blockchain. The centralization is a moot point, you are picking at hairs.

The value of the transactions may differ, but at least the Steem transactions are more likely to be 'real', that is to say they are transferring value from one person to another. See my earlier comment about how a large proportion of ethereum 'value' is merely shuffling coins between different wallets of the same owners.

Sia does an estimated 100,000 transactions per day doing uploads and downloads via payment channels. Fully decentralized and trustless, yet because it's layer 2 these transactions are often overlooked.

Have you a source for that? I'd be interested in reading about it.

In any case, the end result is the same. There's a large amplification factor in ethereum transactions, since many transactions are just the shuffling of coins without any value actually changing hands.

I did a quick google and didn't find the article I was thinking of. But it's actually only 10% of transactions, which is the metric the OP's article is about, and 68% of transaction value. But if it's just the normal operation of exchanges I don't think we can really conclude that there's no value changing hands. If you transfer funds from one account on Coinbase to another on Kraken or whatever, there's a temporary address involved, just like the article is describing. And it's the same with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

The article implies that there are more transactions going on than would be expected for an exchange with lots of user accounts. The first diagram suggests that there is a rotation of transactions, i.e. coins are churned through multiple addresses many times. That kind of thing is not needed to operate an exchange; you just need to gather money from deposits, send money to withdrawals (many exchanges fail at this point :) and shuffle the rest between a hot wallet and an offline store from time to time. In other words, the ethereum transactions are far in excess of what a typical exchange would need. A bitcoin exchange doing so many transactions would probably go bust from the fees alone!

(However, the story isn't crystal clear about what they mean by the 'rotation' of transactions. It says 'rotated 80 times' but I'm not sure if that means each input address goes through 80 transactions before going to an output.)

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