Etherium dwarfs that at a mighty 14 transactions per second.
Meanwhile, PayPal crawls along with a pathetic 488 tps.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/730838/number-of-daily-c...
the speed of light, as a hard limit, starts to become insurmountable when your consensus pathway has to be traversed the equivalent of tens of millions of km of signal path in order for every node to have an equal influence on the validity of every other node's vote.
I suspect the reason TX speed tends to stay mired in the tens per second region is that no amount of consensus accounting gimmickry will overcome the underlying physical limitations of true global scale decentralization of consensus.
The main bottleneck for cryptocurrencies is that every single node has to validate every single transaction. So your global throughput is effectively limited to what a single node can process.
Technologies like STARKs can improve these bottlenecks without introducing new trust layers or trust assumptions but still carry data availability requirements which once again require every node to have all the data, even if they don't have to actually process all the data.
There are additional techniques you can use to minimize the data availability impact but then you start introducing trust assumptions again.
It's a tricky problem and there's a good reason none of the major chains have adopted a solution, but it's not as dire as your post suggests, nor does your post highlight any of the fundamental issues at play.
literally what I said in my post. the mining aspect was your addition, not mine. I am describing an idealized model which doesn't even consider the added complication of mining to incentivise playing by the rules(let's assume coins are issued based on signs from, say, zeus). just simple consensus on a single 0/1 truth value.
this is the hard scalability problem, and people claiming to fix it are ultimately bound to create hierarchies of truth authority, undermining decentralization and recreating the existing concentric power structure (with themselves in the center) they claim to obsolete.
But it seems like decentralization and gas fees/tps are going to be inversely correlated no?
Instead of having X PH of PoW difficulty for a single blockchain, you have N parallel blockchains with ~X/N PH difficulty. Same energy needs, N*single chain performance. The coolest bit being that N can increase in an upgrade w/o needing to increase energy consumption, should the network gain traction and need more throughput. It upgraded from 10 to 20 chains last summer.
Other cool bit is that each chain runs a formally verifiable LISP (Pact)... I jokingly refer to Kadena as "a multithreaded LISP machine in the sky".
Disclaimer: I designed the Chainweb consensus algorithm
I did in the paper this post is about (in the context of bitcoin). Look at the section on Miner Centralization Pressure: https://github.com/fresheneesz/bitcoinThroughputAnalysis#min...
> these high tps coins all seem to get around this by weakening decentralization
Yes, that's true.
> in order for every node to have an equal influence on the validity of every other node's vote
The trick is to ensure that distance does not play a substantial role in a node's "vote". That's one reason that blocks must take so much time to be mined in bitcoin (10 minutes). Proof of work systems that have less-than-a-minute block times are just not very safe. It takes time for lots of entities to come to a consensus across the whole world.
> I suspect the reason TX speed tends to stay mired in the tens per second region is that no amount of consensus accounting gimmickry will overcome the underlying physical limitations of true global scale decentralization of consensus.
Yeah, there are physical limits. The speed of light is the ultimate limit here. You can't come to a consensus with someone faster than you can send and receive a response from them. And the minimum requirements for consensus probably require a lot more than one message and one response.
Ethereum's layer 2 can handle tens of thousands transactions per second. These are then settled on chain as a single transaction. There are multiple layer 2 solutions already working and more are coming. It's not a pipedream anymore they are live.
You’ll have to look up the transactions for each ERC20 token with volume. Volume is much higher than the base chain, but we are still waiting on rollups and sharding to supercharge TPS.
Why does that sounded like its already being solved by Matic? From my understanding, Polygon Matic do exactly that.
Sure those aren't purely decentralized but a decentralized settlement layer is probably where most of the value is anyway.
Yes, I suppose there's no room for improvement there.
Why?
The internet itself is a good example. It strikes a balance between decentralization and efficiency through the use of ISPs as supernodes.
On the other hand, there's room for a lot of growth, it's not even a single transaction per day for the almost 8 billion people that we have.
Just barely creeping across the line with crypto means its already inadequate.