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Transactions per second. Network speed. Scaling. Whatever guise it comes in, the crypto community seems obsessed with transaction speed — especially when it comes to Ethereum.* So much so, that some people think scaling ‘problems’ are to blame for Ether’s recent bear market.
“PayPal, the global monolith, makes millions of transactions every day — but runs at an average of 193 per second.”
But is our obsession with transaction speed shortsighted? Of course, speedy stable transactions are essential for the future of all but the most specialist projects. Yet in the wider world of FinTech, there’s no such obsession. PayPal, the global monolith, makes millions of transactions every day — but runs at an average of 193 per second. This is a long way off blockchain’s ‘holy grail’ of one million transactions per second and yet no one’s calling into question PayPal’s entire future.
I was recently discussing this with Ian Worrall, the CEO and Founder of MyBit, a non-profit blockchain startup. Since the project relies on the Ethereum network, you’d expect he’d be pretty bothered about transactions per second. He wasn’t.
His thoughts on the subject came down to one thing above all others: security. Of course, rapidly scaling the Ethereum network would be fantastic — no one’s disputing that — but making it the goal seems misguided. It’s all a bit of a smokescreen, a distraction. And here’s why.
“Of course, rapidly scaling the Ethereum network would be fantastic — no one’s disputing that — but making it the goal seems misguided.”
For starters, actual usage of the Ethereum network is lower than you might think. A quick look at DappRadar shows average daily users in the hundreds and transactions in the thousands for the entire Ethereum network. If we return to the example of PayPal, a platform that processes some five million transactions a day at an average of 193 per second, it really puts the ‘holy grail’ of one million in perspective. The whole Ethereum network doesn’t need that kind of speed — never mind a single project or dApp. Yet, at least.
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