How would Bitcoin handle TPS like Visa?

[Lauda]

Will reading the whitepaper be enough?

No.

If you would like to share some useful resources of information, I would greatly appreciate it.

• Lightning network website
• Lightning-dev mailing list
• lightning-dev - IRC channel
• LN explained

My personal favorite solution is altcoins that primarily are used either in a specific industry or a specific region.

Wouldn't it be easier if Bitcoin was primarily used everywhere? Constantly having to exchange currencies should be a thing of the past.

[VeritasSapere]

I think that Bitcoin will be able to scale to Visa scale levels over the long term, just by increasing the blocksize. It depends on the rate of technological progress. It might be twenty years or a hundred years but we will get their eventually. You could even say that Bitcoin is ahead of its time in terms of its technological demands.

It reminds me a bit of some good computer games I like to play, that only run to its full potential ten years after it has been released, so that view distance, unit caps and all that good stuff can get maxed out and modded.

[Abiky]

• Lightning network website
• Lightning-dev mailing list
• lightning-dev - IRC channel
• LN explained

Thank you for sharing this useful list. It will be of great use to me. I have just read the first pages and it looks like the best solution for Bitcoin right now. If this gets implemented into Bitcoin, it would improve it a lot in both transaction confirmation times and mainstream use. 

[Kprawn]

They are not perfect.... just two weeks ago I had to make a payment to a mobile service provider and it took two days for the transaction to show on the service provider side. I still need to figure out

why that happened, but I had to make another cash payment at the retail shop for them to accept the payment. Once I did the cash payment, they were happy and they unblocked my account. Now

I have to reclaim the double payment from the mobile service provider, because the bank cannot reverse the transaction for some reason. Every system has it's flaws.

[Denker]

Whatever 'side' you're on, it's pretty hard to see how that could ever be achieved with on chain scaling. There'll have to be something second layer. Whether that'll ever be the lightning network or 21's solution or anyone else remains to be seen.

Yes to achieve that huge amount of transactions per second is impossible to achieve on chain.
Especially if you don't want to lose decentralization in terms of everyone being able to run a full node at home.
Therefore second layer implementations like LN, as you have already mentioned, will be needed.

[Lauda]

I think that Bitcoin will be able to scale to Visa scale levels over the long term, just by increasing the blocksize. It depends on the rate of technological progress. It might be twenty years or a hundred years but we will get their eventually. You could even say that Bitcoin is ahead of its time in terms of its technological demands.

Visa transaction capacity of 2015 achievable in 2115; this makes a lot of sense. 

Thank you for sharing this useful list. It will be of great use to me. I have just read the first pages and it looks like the best solution for Bitcoin right now. If this gets implemented into Bitcoin, it would improve it a lot in both transaction confirmation times and mainstream use.  

Essentially what LN enables you to do is have an theoretically infinite amount of transactions between you and another participant while requiring only 2 transactions on the blockchain (opening and closing the payment channel). The efficiency in comparison to transacting on the blockchain directly is huge. Additionally once you've set-up the channel (which takes around ~30 minutes now (3 confirmations)) your transactions are near instant.

Yes to achieve that huge amount of transactions per second is impossible to achieve on chain.

Well technically we could achieve a much larger TPS than what we have today, however we'd have to sacrifice a lot of decentralization in order to get there. Even then, it is doubtful that we'd ever catch up with Visa.

[VeritasSapere]

It is important that we do scale Bitcoin directly as much as the technology will allow at the time by increasing the blocksize. If we do not do this Bitcoin will not be able to compete with alternative cryptocurrencies. My hope is that technological growth will be faster then adoption, especially considering that people will be free to use off chain solutions which will also take pressure off the main chain. If adoption does outstrip technological growth then people will simply move more traffic to off chain solutions and alternative cryptocurrencies. This is different to arbitrarily restricting the transaction volume now by not increasing the blocksize, that is a form of economic planning which is what Core calls a "fee market". There should be a free market for blockspace instead which would best reflect the technological limitations at any one time.