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Comment by rodiger | Hacker News Reader

The "1-2%" number the author repeatedly cites is misleading at best. These fees do not scale with the amount transacted. BTC tranfers are currently ~$0.80 whether you're moving $1 or $100k, which is a unique feature.

> SQL databases will continue to get faster as hardware speeds up - but blockchains only tend to get slower, as the volume of transactions grows.

This is also misleading, as there are systems like Solana which prioritize speed of confirmation, and do indeed get faster as hardware speeds up. It also allows for sub-cent fees (again, not based on a percentage of the amount moved).

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> and do indeed get faster as hardware speeds up.

This is not actually true, it still has the same scaling bottlenecks with state access but they are expressed differently (via hidden tx finality slowdowns) since it does not have an effective fee market.

Solana also ignores that part of the core reasoning that you'd want to use blockchains is for their decentralization and your ability to independently verify them in their pursuit of being able to claim 4000 tx/s. You need a 10 gigabit network connection to run a full node.

Ideal condition speed vs congestion speed is a different thing- I'm not suggesting they don't face the standard scaling bottlenecks, but it is also true that under similar congestion conditions, the network will run faster as hardware improves.

SQL databases also run slower under high load, which is totally independent of faster hardware allowing for faster databases vs the baseline

Re: independent verification, I agree with you. It's not a great tradeoff. I'm not here to shill Solana as a panacea or anything of the sort, just pointing out clear inaccuracies from the OOP.

But it doesn't, nobody has strictly improved on bitcoin (in terms of crypto design) since it was developed. Other cryptos will make claims about their speed or other things compared to bitcoin but never highlight what trade offs they had to make for those

Ethereum is a strict improvement on Bitcoin in nearly every way. Proof of Stake is a much better consensus mechanism all-around. Smart contracts allow for way more use-cases than just money transfer. The account model is much simpler and more intuitive than UTXO. The block time is considerably faster and finality is guaranteed.

It's not a strict improvement though, it's a set of tradeoffs

Wrong. Some other cryptos do highlight their trade-offs. E.g. google "This isn’t to say Grin is better than others, it simply makes different tradeoffs."

Okay, you're right I should have said "most don't" got em

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