Bitcoin Blocks Are Like Container Ships
One of the alarming discoveries that awaits everyone early on in their Bitcoin educational journey is how few transactions the Bitcoin blockchain can handle.
To read the full report click the download link.
One of the alarming discoveries that awaits everyone early on in their Bitcoin educational journey is how few transactions the Bitcoin blockchain can handle.
Each block added to the Bitcoin blockchain is ~1MB. Approximately 4,000 Bitcoin transactions can fit into this 1MB block.
Since there is one new Bitcoin block added every 10 minutes on average, this suggests that Bitcoin can manage only ~7 transactions / second.
This is immensely problematic, as Bitcoin aspires to be the open-source, digital money for the entire world. And this sticker-shock number is what has lured countless people into the false promises of altcoins with high transaction / second throughput.
The simple truth is Bitcoin’s path to scaling deliberately avoids increasing the size of those paltry 1MB blocks. Growing the block size limit is infeasible because it would bloat the size of the blockchain enormously (1000x or more). It also would introduce a dangerous precedent of changing Bitcoin’s core rule set. No, this battle has already been waged (the 2017 Blocksize War), and thankfully, small blocks and immutability prevailed.
To read the full report click the download link.
