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If there were a million transactions per block (every 10 mins,) there would be a lot more than 7 per second.


Yes, about 1700 per second. Which is about the average number of Visa transactions when averaged over a whole year but still very small compared to what VisaNet is capable of (about 65,000 transactions per second)

I can’t find examples of number of cash transactions per second globally, but the Eurozone averages 1.2 cash transactions per person per day (and 0.3 card txs/person/day). Give that there are 7.8 billion people in the world, if each makes on average 1.2 cash transactions per day and 0.3 card transactions per day, that’s about 100,000 cash transactions per second and 25,000 card transactions per second.

Cash, of course, is trivially scalable. At current usage rates, VisaNet could handle all card transactions if everyone used cards as much as Europe. Total payments of about 125,000 per second is about 2 orders of magnitude greater than what a Bitcoin with 1000 fold increase in block size could do.

None of these systems is setup for micropayments. And increasing the Blocksize doesn’t change that. Visa or cash still seem far better for the small, casual payments Satoshi imagined Bitcoin would enable.




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