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snorberhuis / MasterThesis

Git repository for my master thesis
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Formulate scale targets #22

Closed snorberhuis closed 9 years ago

snorberhuis commented 9 years ago

Formulate the scale targets that a cyber currency needs to achieve to be a viable replacement:

Taken from bitcoin wiki: VISA handles on average around 2,000 transactions per second (tps), so call it a daily peak rate of 47,000 tps. [1]

PayPal, in contrast, handles around 10 million transactions per day for an average of 115 tps. [2]

Let's take 4,000 tps as starting goal. Obviously if we want Bitcoin to scale to all economic transactions worldwide, including cash, it'd be a lot higher than that, perhaps more in the region of a few hundred thousand tps. And the need to be able to withstand DoS attacks (which VISA does not have to deal with) implies we would want to scale far beyond the standard peak rates. Still, picking a target let us do some basic calculations even if it's a little arbitrary.

References:

snorberhuis commented 9 years ago

Enough explanation of bitcoin.