this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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It's a lot of energy for a global (!) maximum of around 7 transactions per second.
Unless you want to use the replica of traditional finance called Lightning Network. Then you have more transactions per second and a whole new set of drawbacks.
Holy shit. 7 transactions a second is horrible and pretty much definitively proves (to me) that it's not currently used as a currency
By chance, do you have a source for that or know where I would go looking?
Because the max blocksize of BTC is heavily crippled, max transactions per block is around 3,500ish. That puts us at about 500k transactions max per day (1 block every 10 min). So divide 500k by how many seconds are in a day (86,400) and you get slightly under 6 TPS. Whoever came up with 7 TPS probably did more accurate math than me.
So what happens if a lot of people want to make transactions at the same time? Do they have to queue? Also, this sounds like anyone can cripple the system by scheduling a few thousand tiny transactions.
Yes, there's a queue called mempool.
Clogging up the network is possible, but costs money (BTC), because transaction fees need to be added to the transactions and those fees need to be higher than those of the highest not yet processed transactions if "regular" users' transactions shall be delayed.
Miners prefer transactions with higher fees (to be precise: higher fees per occupied block space), because they earn them when creating the block successfully - together with the BTC that get issued when a block gets created.
There's a transaction fee, the higher you pay the more priority you have (since miners get a cut).
Different transactions use different amounts of space so it's always going to be a rough estimate.
Yep. That 3.5k I pulled out of my ass was just by looking at a graph of max transactions per block thus far. It highly depends on the efficiency of the transactions and size of each.
You can look how much space a transaction requires, how much size is available per block and how many blocks per time are being created (at average).
The only way to exceed the figure is by creating transactions with 1 (or few) input(s) and a lot of outputs as they are more efficient in terms of space per tx. Individuals rarely have use for that, but exchanges tend to do that.
If you want to do your own research, start with the fundamentals and investigate the numbers (size per tx depending on type of tx, size per block, blocks per time).
Oh yeah there are many criticisms of Bitcoin one can make, I just don't think the energy one is very convincing if you think about it a bit
Shall I add the mountain of electronic waste to the list?
I mean, Bitcoin mining devices can literally do nothing else but calculate SHA256.
Once they can no longer be operated economically, they're garbage.
At least Ethereum's PoW ran on GPUs, which can be used for, let's say: gaming!
And Ethereum showed that a transition from PoW to PoS is possible.
I think that Bitcoin sparked a great idea, but way better implementations of that idea are available. Bitcoin has a massive network effect and first mover advantage. technology wise it's no longer on top of the list.
I agree with everything you've said
Pretty much the only things Bitcoin has on Ethereum today is a better brand and Lindy effect