As we have already seen in our discussions around ‘sound money,’ the Bitcoin blockchain sacrifices scalability for security and decentralisation.
In contrast, centralised and secure systems such as Visa can process tens of thousands of transactions per second, but suffer from the double-spend and trust issue; proof of work functions enable trust without authority but cannot achieve this throuput.
Bitcoin currently processes around five transactions per second, and Ethereum is around 15, making things slow and impractical.
The Ethereum community is hard at work fixing this at the moment with Ethereum 2.0. This open-source development’s main objective is to improve the transaction capability from 15 per second to tens of thousands with a technique known as sharding.
More details on this are for a more advanced article. For now, it is essential to remember that blockchain technology is in its infancy and whilst yes there is a lot of promise to the technology the community is still in the process of developing and applying it at scale.
Many projects describe themselves as blockchains, yet fail to demonstrate the characteristics described here, because they cannot be achieved out of the box, and Principal-Agent problem always means that where someone can exert control, there is a good chance they will and not necessarily to the user’s benefit.
Blockchain has become a buzzword that is sometimes used to infer credibility, as was seen during the dotcom days, and meaningless references to being ‘an online business’
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