Or we could simply not use a blockchain for Doritos purchases. If we’re willing to do that — if we’re able to trade off “Fort Knox” security for Doritos — we can get dramatically higher speed and efficiency for those transactions, and the options we have for implementing this significantly widen. Those options also tend to be inherently safer than their on-chain counterparts, because they both operate on an abstract level, and don’t impact the majority of investment capital entrusted to the network, which tends to lie dormant unmoving in cold wallets regardless.
But if we’re only willing to put Doritos purchases on-chain for some reason because we stubbornly refuse to give up Fort Knox security, and demand a permanent record of our Doritos transactions until the heat death of the universe, we end up with a lot less decentralization, and our options for scaling narrow and become increasingly complex (e.g. sharding).
Worse still, Visa does 50,000+ tps — and that’s just one credit card company. Storing every financial transaction every human in the world ever makes on a blockchain requires infeasibly large block sizes well in excess of 1GB. Meanwhile end users already struggle somewhat to keep up with 1MB blocks on consumer hardware with residential network connections.
(Bear in mind most people interested in extreme on-chain scaling like this have historically also wanted on-chain scaling to handle all forms of cash and credit transactions, plus derivatives trading, “NFTs”, “decentralized exchanges” etc etc, which would demand still more transactional capacity).
Bitcoin could conceivably only increase its block size by a factor of 10-100 before nodes become only possible to run in datacenters. Condemning nodes to forever run in datacenters — lest we forget gargantuan blocks can never be discarded by full nodes — would only allow Bitcoin to hit a measely couple thousand transactions per second at best. What’s the point of doing that at all?
(The choice was obvious to highly technical people at the time of the block size debate, but their voices were drowned out by populist appeals. Also sorry, forgot this was a thread about Ethereum.)
At least a factor of 2-100 would solve the problem we're facing at this moment in time. We can explore solutions (like 2nd layer) while keeping everything usable.
But if we’re only willing to put Doritos purchases on-chain for some reason because we stubbornly refuse to give up Fort Knox security, and demand a permanent record of our Doritos transactions until the heat death of the universe, we end up with a lot less decentralization, and our options for scaling narrow and become increasingly complex (e.g. sharding).
Worse still, Visa does 50,000+ tps — and that’s just one credit card company. Storing every financial transaction every human in the world ever makes on a blockchain requires infeasibly large block sizes well in excess of 1GB. Meanwhile end users already struggle somewhat to keep up with 1MB blocks on consumer hardware with residential network connections.
(Bear in mind most people interested in extreme on-chain scaling like this have historically also wanted on-chain scaling to handle all forms of cash and credit transactions, plus derivatives trading, “NFTs”, “decentralized exchanges” etc etc, which would demand still more transactional capacity).
Bitcoin could conceivably only increase its block size by a factor of 10-100 before nodes become only possible to run in datacenters. Condemning nodes to forever run in datacenters — lest we forget gargantuan blocks can never be discarded by full nodes — would only allow Bitcoin to hit a measely couple thousand transactions per second at best. What’s the point of doing that at all?
(The choice was obvious to highly technical people at the time of the block size debate, but their voices were drowned out by populist appeals. Also sorry, forgot this was a thread about Ethereum.)