Question about current capacity

[Daveofnj]

Hello,
I have just recently started learning about Bitcoin.  One of the issues I've read about is the capacity of the network in terms transactions/second.  Anyone know the current capacity?  What's the plan to address this issue?  I know there are a number of possible technical solutions but none I've read about would increase the capacity by orders of magnitude. 

Thanks for any info.
Dave 

[mk4]

If my memory serves me right it's around 7 transactions per second.

The current solution that's gained the most traction is through the Lightning Network[1]. Transacting through LN should be a bit less secure and less decentralized, but it shouldn't be an issue because LN transactions should mostly be used for your daily sort of "coffee" transactions because it's far far faster and cheaper to transact with. Bigger and more expensive transactions should stick to the base layer.

[1] https://lightning.network/

[ranochigo]

The capacity will vary wildly depending on the types of transactions that you're looking at, P2SH transactions can often be bigger than Segwit and Legacy or the number of inputs/outputs per transaction. Currently Segwit adoption is still below 50% which means that the blocks can't be at its theoretical maximum of 2.3MB. While the solution is not for everyone to switch to Segwit, it would definitely help greatly.

Taproot will make certain transactions smaller as they can be aggregated into a single signature for multisig. There probably isn't anything that will increase the on-chain capacity exponentially barring any block size increase or whatnot. I'll think Lightning network is more useful for smaller transaction. Of course, if there's any better proposals, do let me know might've missed something during my hiatus.

[Tytanowy Janusz]

Hello,
I have just recently started learning about Bitcoin.  One of the issues I've read about is the capacity of the network in terms transactions/second.  Anyone know the current capacity?  What's the plan to address this issue?  I know there are a number of possible technical solutions but none I've read about would increase the capacity by orders of magnitude. 

Thanks for any info.
Dave 

Bitcoin is now more like "investment tool" AKA digital gold rather than digital money that is ment to replace fiats. So the fact that bitcoin is slow would not threaten him in any way. Bitcoin will never be as fast as visa. Is it bad? There is a scalable solution to it. You can wrap bitcoins from your hot wallet to other, more scalable, less secured/ less decentralized chains - f.e. BSC and use wrapped bitcoin. I think that thats what future of bitcoin will looks like. Majority of bitcoin-related traffic will take place outside of bitcoin chain.

[TangentC]

Hello,
I have just recently started learning about Bitcoin.  One of the issues I've read about is the capacity of the network in terms transactions/second.  Anyone know the current capacity?  What's the plan to address this issue?  I know there are a number of possible technical solutions but none I've read about would increase the capacity by orders of magnitude. 

Thanks for any info.
Dave 

Their are no plans to improve Bitcoin onchain transaction capacity.
Their plan is for people to quit using bitcoin onchain and move to their fee based offchain systems like Lighting Network or Liquid,
where the middle men profit off of transactions.

Easy solutions are
1.  Larger BlockSize
2.  Faster Blockspeeds

Litecoin & Dogecoin have much greater onchain transaction capacity than bitcoin,
mainly due to their faster blockspeeds, litecoin 2.5 minutes & Dogecoin 1 minute.
Bitcoin Cash has a larger blocksize  to accommodate more transactions.

So Litecoin and Dogecoin are superior to bitcoin in onchain transaction capacity and have much lower transaction fees because of it.
Litecoin activated segwit, before bitcoin , so it is also LN capable if offchain ever catches on.

[DapanasFruit]

You are referring to the scalability problem associated with Bitcoin. Compared to other cryptocurrencies already in the market, we know that Bitcoin is not really the best but since this is the most known and the most trusted of them all it seems to me that its scalability is not a big factor for its continuing viability. Anyway, most holders and enthusiasts understand that Bitcoin is more of a store of value than a currency. Of course, its scalability problem can be a limiting factor and that is why there are now many possible upgrades on the works, and I am particularly looking at Lightning Network as a possible solution.

[Kong Hey Pakboy]

If my memory serves me right it's around 7 transactions per second.

That is really slow considering that bitcoin and blockchain is constantly growing day by day. With 86400 seconds in a day, that means that 4,233,600 transactions can happen in a day not including peaks and downs. I guess that infrastructure for the network can help speed it up to make the network less congested but that would be too expensive for LN as btc is decentralized and funding for infrastructures could be difficult.

[amishmanish]

Their are no plans to improve Bitcoin onchain transaction capacity.
Their plan is for people to quit using bitcoin onchain and move to their fee based offchain systems like Lighting Network or Liquid,
where the middle men profit off of transactions.

LN fees will go to whoever runs an LN node, not to just centralized parties. It is similar to all the PoS or federated solutions proposed by alternate chains but with the final settlement of Bitcoin chain.

Easy solutions are
1.  Larger BlockSize
2.  Faster Blockspeeds

If you are not just a brainless shill then you would know that those are not EASY solutions. It is about choosing the most obvious, easy way out till your chain actually starts being used and then you hit the bottleneck due to the inherent trilemma of block-chains. It does not make any coin better or worse to adopt such solutions. With a faster block-speed and higher size you just increase the storage and throughput requirements. These can surely be optimized but that is a fork on the road, we haven't reached yet.

[hugeblack]

There are many solutions that can be included:

Side chains.
Layer Two Solutions.
Reliance on third-party applications such as platforms, payment cards, Visa, MasterCard.

This is if we assume the occurrence of full adoption and use of Bitcoin for daily use, but often what happens is the use of Bitcoin in international commercial transactions and as a store of value (people will not need to use onChain network in daily transactions)

[fiulpro]

Hello,
I have just recently started learning about Bitcoin.  One of the issues I've read about is the capacity of the network in terms transactions/second.  Anyone know the current capacity?  What's the plan to address this issue?  I know there are a number of possible technical solutions but none I've read about would increase the capacity by orders of magnitude. 

Thanks for any info.
Dave 

Due to extremely limited block size between 1-4Mb most of the times the transactions are possible : 7 per second now this is something that is definitely a very big problem as you do know already but at the same time

Let me quote the solutions that have been proposed:

Schnorr signatures have been proposed as a scaling solution by long-time developer and Blockstream co-founder Pieter Wuille.
Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees (MAST) is a proposal by Johnson Lau which reduces the size of smart contracts (complex scripts), and increases their privacy.
A 2006 paper by Mihir Bellare enables signature aggregation in O(1) size, which means that it will not take more space to have multiple signers. Bellare-Neven reduces to Schnorr for a single key.[8] Bellare-Neven has been implemented.

Now honestly this is something that just has been proposed and not implemented , we have seen forks every year and therefore there are alternatives available but at the same time it is indeed important for bitcoins to have slower transactions , it makes the whole network more secure as a whole. That is like the whole different topic. But if we get further into it the reason it is so important to address is:



Now what we can see here is more and more people are waiting everyday on that, now we can either :
1. Make the lightning network more efficient
2. Increase in the block size

Both of them comes with their own security problems and issues therefore this is again an in-depth analysis of why it's low in the first place.

Source : Wikipedia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem

[seoincorporation]

Bitcoin blockchain has blocks each 10 min. approx. Each block contains more or less than 2500 transactions, that number is variable because some transactions have a bigger size than others. So, as you say, capacity is a current problem. If we see 100,000 transactions in one minute that will be chaos, and most of them will take a long time to confirm.

The possible solutions are LN (As other users already mention), Bigger blocks that include more transactions like we can see with BCH, and faster blocks like the ones we see with dogecoin.

[tbterryboy]

I have just recently started learning about Bitcoin.  One of the issues I've read about is the capacity of the network in terms transactions/second.  Anyone know the current capacity?  What's the plan to address this issue?  I know there are a number of possible technical solutions but none I've read about would increase the capacity by orders of magnitude. 

That has been how it is for years and you’re not the first person to bring this issue up, so many people has always been talking about it and they keep saying it repeatedly. Transaction has always been the problem with Bitcoin and the devs have not been doing anything about it.

We have seen Lightening Network introduced , but no one even makes use of that, you will hardly see any of the wallets integrating that feature. All the top wallets that I have been making use of, none of them has that lightening network feature, so I always have to go with the normal transaction. And I believe the reason why they haven’t allowed lightening network on their platforms is because it’s still in development stages.

[mk4]

That has been how it is for years and you’re not the first person to bring this issue up, so many people has always been talking about it and they keep saying it repeatedly. Transaction has always been the problem with Bitcoin and the devs have not been doing anything about it.

Here's where you're wrong. You think devs aren't doing anything about it? What do you call SegWit then? It's just that the speed and fee improvement isn't as cheap and as fast as a centralized cryptocurrency has. It's just that the devs are prioritizing security and decentralization a lot more than speed and cheap fees, as they should.

We have seen Lightening Network introduced , but no one even makes use of that, you will hardly see any of the wallets integrating that feature. All the top wallets that I have been making use of, none of them has that lightening network feature, so I always have to go with the normal transaction. And I believe the reason why they haven’t allowed lightening network on their platforms is because it’s still in development stages.

BlueWallet? Electrum? I'm pretty sure these are pretty reputable wallets. What "top wallets" are you speaking of in the first place? Also, you can ask around here, there are a good number of users that are already using Lightning to transact. It's just that most exchanges doesn't support LN yet hence why adoption is low.

[kryptqnick]

The problem of scalability is very real and cannot simply be ignored. However, as others pointed out, it's not ignored and some solutions are offered to reduce the fees and make it easier for Blockchain to deal transactions more efficiently (or have fewer transactions). Apart from the solutions that were already mentioned, there are less obvious things which I believe could nevertheless be effective to combat high fees. One of them is allowing zero-confirmation transactions for small sums of money (and these transactions can be sent with very low fees because of no urgency of the confirmation), and another is to use altcoins along with Bitcoin for transactions (if we're talking about them becoming means of payment), so that there's a smaller load on Bitcoin Blockchain.

[hatshepsut93]

I know there are a number of possible technical solutions but none I've read about would increase the capacity by orders of magnitude. 

There's actually only one solutions - Lightning Network. All other solutions are purely theoretical and were discarded a long time ago. There are some potential optimizations that would slightly boost Bitcoin's on-chain capacity, but it's wrong to think about them as scaling solutions. Bitcoin needs to get 3 orders of magnitude more capacity to compete with fiat payments, and only LN can allow something close to that.

[DannyHamilton]

There are no plans to improve Bitcoin onchain transaction capacity.
Additionally, their plan is for people to quit using bitcoin onchain with it's fee-based transaction system where the mining middle-men profit off transactions, and move to their fee based offchain systems like Lighting Network or Liquid,
where the middle men there is more room for competition to drive down transaction costs and it is simpler for decentralized users to profit off of transactions.

FTFY