Bitcoin Forum

I am trying to understand how a distributed network can ever hope to compete with centralized processing speeds of major banks that typically clear 25k transactions per second.

I get the appeal of a decentralized currency and want to back an alt currency that could be deployed in confidence to solve low latency, high transaction problems like gaming or offshore wires like the Western Union Business.

Electroneum wants this markets and I like this coin, but how are they going to solve the latency problems.

My question is really, is a distributed block chain a feasable soltution?
Do any altcoins have the capability of processing that many transactions?

Decentralized solutions generally have way less capacity than centralized solutions. It is unlikely that any actually decentralized coin will be able to have the same transaction capacity of centralized solutions with today's technology.

But it is the only way to achieve a permissionless, immutable and uncensorable payment system though. We should accept that consensus takes time in decentralized networks. If the OP thinks this is a disadvantage then he should sell his Bitcoins and hold Paypal dollars.

With a few innovative changes in the network architecture, block-chain/distributed ledger technology will eventually match or better the current financial transaction systems. (Working on it  ;))

The pros of a decentralized blockchain based cryptocurrency has more pros than cons. Transaction speed and capcity is one ongoing battle and it's being worked on regeressly on Bitcoin and other altcoins as well. It can be improved with offchain or second layer solutions which can still be decentralized. For example take the case of lightning networks where a payment channel is created off-chain and the transactions are instant and can handle tens or thousands of concurrent transactions which is important for micro transactions.

But to answer you second question, current altcoins do not have the necessary capacity to compete with visa or mastercard or even paypal. With proof of work, this may involve a tremendous amount of hashing power which could also mean a lot of energy useage off power grids unless greener methodologies are adopted.

It would depend on what you need. If you want to buy something on Amazon, then Paypal will be good enough for you. But if you want to buy some drugs on the dark market, then Bitcoin is what you need.


It is not that simple. We should see a working implementation of Lightning working in a testnet before we can say anything.


Your understanding of proof of work and the blockchain is wrong. Please read the Bitcoin developer's documentation. https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-documentation

What do you think about messagingas a chain mechanism?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC6RYwYPnpU

I have been reading many people expressing the same concern with the decentralized platform that Bitcoin is based on. Right now, the scaling problem has been one of the major things that can hinder the mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency and in extension the transfer fees have been rising to the point that they are not anymore very competitive in comparison to centralized systems under many corporate service providers.

Does it showing us the fact that we can't have our cake and eat it too? Well, we are waiting for ways to answer this big challenge to Bitcoin and hope that soon solutions would be coming true so that we can really say that Bitcoin is a good store of value aside from being a widely accepted currency. I understand that Bitcoin is still relatively young and to make it evolved on a higher level can take some time no matter if the value has already soared a lot due to heavy speculations.

Bitcoin should have been fast, lean, robust, vigorous and should cost less at all times...let's start telling the whole community of how Bitcoin should be.

The transaction speed setting determines how quickly an invoice payment is considered to be confirmed,which would be the status at which you would fulfill and complete the order.

None could solve, not Bitcoins at least. Not against Bitcoins but after S2X got called off, I saw the same problems occurring back with the fees part where everyone started paying off more than 0.0008 BTC per transaction which translates to roughly $6 per transaction as a fee. I really can't take it when I need to pay such high fees if I am about to send just 0.01 BTC which will be just $72. There are no altcoins too that can cope up with this.


I hardly believe there will be any, we were against S2X because block size was the actual reason that could bust the drives with the total volume of Blockchain that it will gather in it. Transactions may be processed but if you say that it should be per second, then I think we will really need an upgrade (not S2X), not in the block size but the mining equipment and hardware. There should be something to cope up with the sudden spike in global demand related to cryptocurrencies. This is what we are lacking and may prove to be disastrous for crypto-economy if nothing is done soon.

 could not agree more. This is a classic scaling problem. At some point throwing more processing at the problem will not help.
When the curve of demand vs processing goes vertical, the next increment in demand will gap away form the curve and the system will be degraded...

Arn't we there already?

What happens when the herd arrives?

This may cause BTC holders to rotate out and price to suffer... perhaps that happened the last few weeks?

I think if you add up all the transactions completed on all altcoins per second you have your answer of how we win.  This is a team effort.  No one coin/blockchain can solve all our problems.