Fiat does better than 7 transactions per second.
I feel like every time I hear about scaling crypto the answer is to build a system that’s actually decoupled from crypto and occasionally writes back a little bit of info.
Edit: It seems like Solana was actually built for decent scale and claims ~3k tps. This is surprisingly high, though, given, that Visa does about 7k tps on average. What are all these transactions on Solana?
It's problem is that the Bitcoin development community is allergic to improvement in a way that, for example, Ethereum is not. Ethereum never would have existed if the BTC community was open to developing the protocol.
RE: Other crypto with proper consensus mechanisms that have better throughput: ETH's L2 ecosystem is reasonably fast - something like 19000 TPS sustained was achieved recently, with an average around 10000 TPS and an instantaneous peak of around 24000. This is just an organic number - it certainly could go much higher, there just isn't demand for those transactions right now. It's hard to say how fast it could go.
RE: your last point, Solana is junk - it abandons proper consensus mechanism in favor of throughput. It's subject to all the same problems that delegated POS systems have because that's what it is.
How does this work? It feels like moving all of this off the blockchain loses a bunch of the supposed value.
If I move to a “side chain” do I get to keep the guarantees around settlement? I would assume no, not until this gets worn back to the block chain.
I think I understand (theoretically) how the side chain would increase throughput and reduce transaction fees, but these benefits as I understand them come specifically from making the side chain high volume. If I need to do one transaction with you, the side chain is redundant, right?
> RE: your last point, Solana is junk
Good to know. I only know what I learned in maybe 20 minutes of research.
Not all L2 are about throughput exclusively, some are, for example, more focused on private ZKSnark based transactions. There is a huge quantity of development out there.
Generally the security guarantees on L2 range from identical to the main chain to 'good enough' to 'I pinkie promise not to take your money'. It's a permissionless protocol so that's kinda what you get.
A good currency is stable. Bitcoin has gone up over 5x in the last 5 years. This is not a good currency, though it’s certainly been a good speculative bet.
In other words: * deflationary nature * independence of any government * speculation
Governments will keep printing money. Stock market is only good in US (check Japan and China). Bitcoin is good alternative investment in places where options primarily limited to property.
What makes mint condition Babe Ruth baseball cards worth what they're listed at?
* https://www.sportscardspro.com/search-products?q=babe+ruth&t...
Something is "worth" whatever someone is willing to pay for it.
I want 3 things from crypto:
* throughput that _could_ scale to something like visa. 50k/second christmas.
* privacy by default for everyone - "public ledger" for a currency replacement is INSANE
* reasonable transaction completion time ( < 1 minute)