Bitcoin Forum

I am sure this must have been asked many times but please help me understand. what will happen if one billion people were to use Bitcoin as their currency of choice, will the infrastructure be able to handle the traffic and will the transaction speed become extremely slow?

Simple answer, no.
Bitcoin, as it is now can not scale to handle 1 billion people.
In addition, it can not handle 1 billion people making multiple txs per day each.

Because of this limitation, there are proposals and actual projects/tests running now to scale
Bitcoin by using specially designed side systems that use bitcoin as its settlement asset.
You may have heard of them through terms such as: Lightning Network, Side-chains, and such.

Some believe it is possible to scale bitcoin within itself, but there is dispute as to whether this
is safe and fine or will lead to bloat and rapid centralization. This is known to users following
this issue and sometimes (most of the time) heated debate as the "blocksize debate".

The current mindset is to optimize the Bitcoin system and code as much as possible first.

What AgentofCoin said is correct, as far as I know.  But I think it's crucial to emphasize that a lot of the predicted problems, are just that, predicted problems.  If there were actually 1 billion people about to use bitcoin, we'd know that because currently there'd be a steady increase towards that 1 billion.  Therefore, it makes sense just to take things slowly and figure out actual solutions to the long term problems by careful planning now.  No need to act like the house is on fire, it's not.  Things are good, we can plan for a strong future by taking this time to think hard and build consensus and community.

At this time I doubt bitcoin can handle a million transaction fast.  If we reach that point we'll have to increase the block size or come up with another solution.  The ones who says no by then needs to be shot.

as it is now, no.

but bitcoin will scale in time, just like technology always does.

If you would ask in 1990 if billions could use the internet simultaneously, the answer would have been no

If you would ask in 2000 if it would be possible to stream 1080p in 60 frames a second over the internet the answer would have been no.

Technology evolves, bitcoin will adapt.

I guess you weren't around during the stress tests of last July. I had one transaction which never went through, and another which took more than 12 hours to go through. A solution is in the pipeline, but it's taking one hell of a time to materialize.

That is absolutely true.Technology evolves with time and mostly it evolves gradually.In all probability we are not going to get 1 billion bitcoin users that fast.When we actually have,we would have infrastructure to handle it

Bitcoin handles around ~3TPS on average, which equals to 1800 transactions per ten minutes or ~259 000 transactions per day. Now let's factor this in:

Even if we assume that 1 000 000 000 people only do 1 transaction daily with an average size of 1/2 KB (realistically the average might be closer to 1KB):
We get 500 000 000 KB per day, i.e. 500 GB per day. Now you have to divide this by 144 (number of blocks per day) and you end up with ~3.5 GB blocks for just 1 TX per person per day. It is clear that this is a distant future if we focus on on-chain scaling. However, there are secondary layer solutions being built that will help accommodate a lot more users.

That must be something on your end (probably bad fee), as I have never experienced anything like that.

average transaction is about 500bytes (not 250bytes like lauda used to pretend nor 1kb like lauda hints at today, but im glad he is sticking with 500bytes for his scenario today)


as for the secondary layers.. (LN for instance) not everyone pays the same destination address.. so with individual recipient addresses of 1 billion peoples transactions wont be much lower.. maybe 20% lower than standard onchain transactions. after LN has aggregated and merged some of the possible outputs together.

EG imagine it was 100,000 people. over 30 days
instead of
3,000,000 transactions spread out over 30 days.(695 transactions a block)
LN would be
100 transactions to lock in funds on one day

then ONE transaction after 30 days containing a diluted/merged/aggregated 2,400,000 outputs to settle.
sorry but one settlement transaction cannot be 2,400,000 outputs as that would break many bitcoin rules when trying to settle onchain..


the only time you will see a high dilution/merge of outputs is based on limited use single destinations. like satoshi-dice had one address many people could pay into to make a particular 'bet'. instead of individual deposit addresses per bet/per user.

like i said not everyone pays the same person so the settling transaction wont be just one output, but an average dilution of 20% less than normal.. but then combined into one large transaction instead of hundreds of little transactions.

so dont expect LN to convert just 100k peoples monthly activity into a low output tx. but expect an entire settlement to fill a whole block with their single settlement transaction with MANY outputs, is still only part of the settlement which will leed to more bottlenecking it would require mant blocks to settle the LN.
also because there wont be much room for individuals to transact onchain due to those large LN settlement transactions with bloated fee's due to combined amounts from many LN users. even trying to just 'lock-in' funds into a LN will be a costly headache

making onchain impractical to use or afford and FORCE people into using LN not due to ease of use, but unaffordability of using onchain independently

forcing people to pay a high fee to lock their funds into an LN just to avoid multiple high fee's during the month. and knowing their funds are not offline, but stuck in a LN hub (security risk), should all be things people are aware of when thinking about bitcoin.


so please dont think that LN is a bitcoin salvation by any means.
and dont be persuaded that 1billion people will jump into bitcoin tomorrow either (its actually a slow progression over decades, not weeks or months, so relax)
and dont be persuaded that 1billion people do 1 transaction a day either (its actually less)

technology and infrustructure will grow. so dont be fooled into the roadmap plans of LESS secure hubs/private chains and other off chain idea's being the solution.

Thanks for all the explanation but I don't get why new people who are not invested in Bitcoin will wait for tech to catch up if alternative projects are viable and faster.? Arnt there coins right now that will be able to handle the scalability issue that bitcoins right now face?

You, saying this? Please go back to all the topics from last July. I wasn't the only one. Plenty of transactions didn't go through, and that may happen again tomorrow. The network can handle some 11,000 transactions per hour, that's highly inadequate if we want BTC to become the world's leading cryptocurrency.

I think, it will be able to handle that much users and their transactions in the future, and the development is at its fastest speed and there would be more development occurred in this field and a more efficient way will be introduced for the transactions and confirmations etc.

As users became more the transactions are getting slow because of the congestion on the chain. They might consider creating second layer of transaction to help to fasten the transaction. some transactions takes 20 confirmation before it will confirm on wallet. Therefore the second layer must do to hep.

In theory, there are coins that can handle a large amount of transactions at a semi decent rate (not Visa speeds, but still pretty good)... this is due to the research regarding dynamic block sizes and some cryptonote coins and other coins I think are working on it.  I know of one which is monero, but I won't advertise them here.

Dynamic block sizes work by raising and lowering the byte sizes when needed; it's definitely not a perfect theory of solving the block size problem... but a good step forward.

The infrastructure as it stands won't be able to handle it. But people will just use alts to move money instead (because now most exchanges feature Ether and LTC).

As answered, the infrastructure isn't ready, but there are plans to make it able to handle high transaction volumes. As for transaction speeds they won't change: they've always been instant and will always be instant. Confirmation time is another topic and that's the one you're referring to.

Even at current number of users bitcoin is being delayed due to intense number of transaction within 10 minutes time which account for more than 1 mb and current bitcoin network can't process more than 1 mb block at every 10 minute. So yes bitcoin need to go 2mb or more block rather than current 1 mb block to handle current uses.

Great answer actually it never crosses my mind.but this could be a huge problem i remember I had transactions that took 5 hours to confirm what if their are billions that uses Bitcoin this is going to be a future problem that developer should address

Let's be honest, how many payment methods can handle 1 billion transactions a day? { PayPal / Credit card companies ....? } Their servers are distributed all over the world, so we cannot make a

direct comparison. To put this in perspective, look at this : http://www.statisticbrain.com/paypal-statistics/   In 2015, The Nilson Report, a publication that tracks the credit card industry, found that

Visa’s global network (known as VisaNet) processed 100 billion transactions with a total volume of US$6.8 trillion. By transaction volume their network is approximately three times larger than

MasterCard. { http://www.mastercard.com/us/company/en/newsroom/faqs.html#q11 } = 32 million authorizations of financial transactions a day. All of this is distributed load.  ::)

Yes, I'm saying this. Unless we are talking about an attack of some sort (which I believe might be in the specific case that you're talking about), transactions will not take long to process if you know how to properly use Bitcoin. Not including the proper fee at the time == improper use (assuming that you want the TX to be confirmed quite quickly). I've been transacting over the years and have never had any kind of problems that others have complained about.

Those systems are quite different than Bitcoin. Just imagine if Bitcoin had the confirmation time that Visa has. As far as that aspect is concerned, Bitcoin is better by a huge margin. It might not be able to handle so many TX's today, but it will get there.

I have doubts alts is the answer to the problem, because to serve billion daily transactions, you would need thousands equealy used altcoins. It would be complete mess and coin exchange necessary for every transaction (good for exchanges actually) as no one would be willing to accept every out of the thousands actively used altcoins.

basically every block mined processes transactions, and right now the block size can only support a certain number of transactions. this number is already being debated for being too small. so if one billion people users started using bitcoin theres no way the current size could support that many transactions.

the transactions speeds are pretty much instant as always, to be honest there will never be any change in the transactions speeds, the thing that slows down is network confirmations

the only thing we need to do right now is to include a higher fee in order for the transaction to be confirmed much faster, even though it costs some more money its still not tragedy

Bitcoin network as it is today is in no shape to handle 1 billion users with all their transactions. More people mining bitcoin does not mean faster block times, but
more people making transaction do mean more transactions. But hey, 1 billion people also isnt ready for bitcoin, so there's that too..

The transaction maybe became slow or takes several hours to be confirmed if there will be that huge amount of bitcoin user that will do transactions simultaneously everyday or even every hour.Bitcoin network this days still cannot be able to handle that much users and te sytem may collapse because of over loaded services.

the transection speed is always remain an issue. i think this issue is increasing as the users are increasing. now i think the time is that this issue should be solve. the responsible persons of bitcoin should now solve this issue.

If this will happen in an instant then there will be chaos in bitcoin industry. But given that it will happen slowly then the traffic speed is fast since the blockchain can upgrade their hardwares. But everything lies on the number of miners if at that time the number of miners is sufficient enough to cater the daily transactions then it is good but if not it will be the end to bitcoin.