transaction speed of Bitcoin as users increase - page 2.

Wapinter

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Quote from: zimmah on May 24, 2016, 05:33:26 PM

Quote from: ashapasa on May 24, 2016, 04:56:20 PM

I am sure this must have been asked many times but please help me understand. what will happen if one billion people were to use Bitcoin as their currency of choice, will the infrastructure be able to handle the traffic and will the transaction speed become extremely slow?

as it is now, no.

but bitcoin will scale in time, just like technology always does.

If you would ask in 1990 if billions could use the internet simultaneously, the answer would have been no

If you would ask in 2000 if it would be possible to stream 1080p in 60 frames a second over the internet the answer would have been no.

Technology evolves, bitcoin will adapt.

That is absolutely true.Technology evolves with time and mostly it evolves gradually.In all probability we are not going to get 1 billion bitcoin users that fast.When we actually have,we would have infrastructure to handle it

countryfree

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I guess you weren't around during the stress tests of last July. I had one transaction which never went through, and another which took more than 12 hours to go through. A solution is in the pipeline, but it's taking one hell of a time to materialize.

zimmah

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Quote from: ashapasa on May 24, 2016, 04:56:20 PM

I am sure this must have been asked many times but please help me understand. what will happen if one billion people were to use Bitcoin as their currency of choice, will the infrastructure be able to handle the traffic and will the transaction speed become extremely slow?

as it is now, no.

but bitcoin will scale in time, just like technology always does.

If you would ask in 1990 if billions could use the internet simultaneously, the answer would have been no

If you would ask in 2000 if it would be possible to stream 1080p in 60 frames a second over the internet the answer would have been no.

Technology evolves, bitcoin will adapt.

Jhanzo

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Quote from: ashapasa on May 24, 2016, 04:56:20 PM

I am sure this must have been asked many times but please help me understand. what will happen if one billion people were to use Bitcoin as their currency of choice, will the infrastructure be able to handle the traffic and will the transaction speed become extremely slow?

At this time I doubt bitcoin can handle a million transaction fast. If we reach that point we'll have to increase the block size or come up with another solution. The ones who says no by then needs to be shot.

tspacepilot

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What AgentofCoin said is correct, as far as I know. But I think it's crucial to emphasize that a lot of the predicted problems, are just that, predicted problems. If there were actually 1 billion people about to use bitcoin, we'd know that because currently there'd be a steady increase towards that 1 billion. Therefore, it makes sense just to take things slowly and figure out actual solutions to the long term problems by careful planning now. No need to act like the house is on fire, it's not. Things are good, we can plan for a strong future by taking this time to think hard and build consensus and community.

AgentofCoin

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Quote from: ashapasa on May 24, 2016, 04:56:20 PM

I am sure this must have been asked many times but please help me understand. what will happen if one billion people were to use Bitcoin as their currency of choice, will the infrastructure be able to handle the traffic and will the transaction speed become extremely slow?

Simple answer, no.
Bitcoin, as it is now can not scale to handle 1 billion people.
In addition, it can not handle 1 billion people making multiple txs per day each.

Because of this limitation, there are proposals and actual projects/tests running now to scale
Bitcoin by using specially designed side systems that use bitcoin as its settlement asset.
You may have heard of them through terms such as: Lightning Network, Side-chains, and such.

Some believe it is possible to scale bitcoin within itself, but there is dispute as to whether this
is safe and fine or will lead to bloat and rapid centralization. This is known to users following
this issue and sometimes (most of the time) heated debate as the "blocksize debate".

The current mindset is to optimize the Bitcoin system and code as much as possible first.

ashapasa

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I am sure this must have been asked many times but please help me understand. what will happen if one billion people were to use Bitcoin as their currency of choice, will the infrastructure be able to handle the traffic and will the transaction speed become extremely slow?

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