Bitcoin Forum

So everyone is trying to increase bitcoin adoption in every way possible.  But what if people really started to use it in earnest.  What if there were 1 million transactions per second.  Could the blockchain handle 1 million transactions per second?  Seems like that would be far too much data. 

Then, we can safely say - don't bother.  If we are successful, then we will hit this upper limit and the whole thing will come down again.  Why push for wide adoption if it will only result in crushing the system?

What is the upper limit on transactions per second - by estimates of those who really understand this limit?

You can find the “Bitcoin 20MB fork” thread, which discusses precisely this.

I believe the current limit is about 7 transactions per second, which gives us 604800 transactions per day, way above the current ~100000 transactions per day on the network.

I only use my credit card twice a week ... do the maths. ::)

Good question like a post a few above said take a look at the 20MB fork, seems this was already thought of and a solution to fix the problem before it came closer is in action. What will happen if the fork fails is what i am curious about but that is another question for another thread.

A wider adoption together with higher BTC prices (when ppl sending tons of dust) could be an issue, but I think we have a couple of years to resolve such limitations.

On reflection that's not actually a huge amount of head room. Five or six times the transactions could be eaten fairly rapidly if there was a super hot new service launched.

Nah this has already been said a million times that this is the max transactions possible if all transactions are the smallest transaction size (a coinbase transaction).

In reality all the transactions are bigger than this allowing more like a max of 3 or 4 t/s

If so, an upgrade/fork is vital, things tend to grow quickly on the Internet, we might not have much time to scale the network before problems start to arise.

There is not enough adoption from users.


Its a mix between users and shops that is needed..
In Denmark we need shops to accept BTC.
We have rather a lot of BTC users in Denmark

There are a number of solutions including increasing the block size and side chains which could be used to handle more transactions.

I wonder if bitcointalk.org could handle even 1 search per second.  :D

Well, real money is on the line and there's an avalanche of bad press and misconception to contend with.

A stupid app can explode from nowhere, but BTC is a hard and complex sell in comparison. I think adoption will come top down and it'll be slow until a lot of extra things are in place.

Let's assume 1 billion people in the world have a credit card, and only use it twice a week. This gives:

2 billion transactions per week
~286 million transactions per day
~12 million transactions per hour
~198 thousand transactions per minute
~3300 transactions per second

So, even with these low usages, the current Bitcoin 2 transactions per second (it's less than 7, actually) is not enough for a global economy.

Bitcointalk is not designed to be a site used by everyone in the world. Compare to Facebook or Google, which are in fact designed for this.

7tps is impossible.  It is a computed value assuming the minimum size txn with only a single input and single output.  A more realistic range would be 2 tps to 4 tps per MB of block size.

Satoshi is a genius for creating this technology wow,I'm envious.
But more so envious for the guys who got a tipped off about bitcoin when it was a dollar :/

What about the guys who was mining it on there computers or the guys hitting the faucets  :D or even the guys that brought on the cents!

We have a 20MB thread that fixes the problems we may or may not face in future with the fork that a lot of people have a worry about  :D

I read that the fork isn't going to happen any time soon and if I have control over my private keys I "should" be fine? lol why the hell would I be envious about the people scraping by on dust?

It will have to happen in the end. Why should you be envious of people who was not scraping dust but 'full bitcoins' in the faucets at the beginning. You are self claimed envious of the dollar buyers so i have to asume also the guys that paid 'nothing' for hundreds.

This is true, as you explained in your thread arguing against keeping the max block size at 1 MB.

However thinking that the number of transactions per second will (near) instantly jump to 1 million is just not realistic. What would more realistically happen is that the number of TPS would increase over time which would give enough time for the network to be forked to allow for a higher number of TPS (via a larger max block size).

If we were to see a(n average) number of TPS that effectively brushed up against the maximum for a medium period of time, then we would see a period similar to some parts of 2013 where we saw confirmation times effectively increase, and the effective minimum tx fee required to have your tx confirmed in the next block increase

ohhhh thats right people must have been gathering more than dust from those faucets in the beginning. Yeah wow man I could of done that...

Yes those who are late to the party are kind of unlucky in the scheme of things the first guys to hit the faucets actually had one of the best paid jobs in the country if they held for a year or 2, could have stacked thousands for free lol