
Ethereum Now Handles More Transactions Than All Digital Currencies Combined - magoghm
http://www.trustnodes.com/2017/11/22/ethereum-now-handles-transactions-digital-currencies-combined
======
joosters
1) They've conveniently ignored many crypto coins with high transaction levels

2) It's believed that 68% of all ethereum transaction value is controlled by
just one system - [https://blog.cyber.fund/huge-ethereum-
mixer-6cf98680ee6c](https://blog.cyber.fund/huge-ethereum-mixer-6cf98680ee6c)
\- A large number of ethereum transactions are just mixing coins to hide
ownership.

~~~
DennisP
Which coins with high transaction levels do you mean?

I'm not aware of other fully-public blockchains that have comparably high
levels, though maybe I'm missing something. With permissioned chains it's much
easier to reach high throughput.

The so-called mixer has been debunked here before. It actually looks like
exchanges, and the temporary addresses they generate for deposits. That does
mean that a large portion of transactions are with exchanges, but that
shouldn't surprise anyone, and would be the same on Bitcoin.

~~~
th0br0
The IOTA network sustained >1.1 million TX over the last 24h as well (a bit
more because there's a gap in my stats) - most without value however.

The selection of protocols is indeed quite selective.

Disclaimer: I work on IOTA.

~~~
haakon
Not really comparable, since IOTA is centralized in its current form.

~~~
Buttes
And since they're value-less transactions, essentially unrewarded mining
activity.

------
mrwong
Bitcoin was a good proof of concept, the true value will come from things like
Ethereum and others.

Even thought the ICOs are in a clear bubble right now, the mechanism behind
the ICOs is a solid one and could provide low friction VC funding for the next
generation of Start Ups. Taking out rent seeking institutions like Private
Equity banks, VCs and traditional banks will create a lot of value.

Ethereums first mover advantage for the ICO market will proof to be of a huge
value in the race for the dominating world crypto currency.

~~~
alexasmyths
"the mechanism behind the ICOs is a solid one "

No - selling a 'fantasy number' in exchange for real currency is not 'solid'
model.

ICO's have been big recently because buyers were hoping to get in early on a
pyramid-like scheme. (Yes, I know it's not quite pyramid), i.e. it's been
hype.

Because ICO's offer no ownership of assets ... well ... in the long run
they're not worth much.

And 'ownerhip of an economy' is not saying much if there is no economy.

Kik's Kin coins are down 80% and not only that - Kik has 900 Billion of the
Kins they can dilute the 100 Billion in market with, meaning another 90%
devaluation is coming.

And Kin's get you a share of what economy exactly? The 'Kik' economy? There is
no Kik economy.

~~~
mrwong
Dismissing ICO in this early stage is equal to dismissing eCommerce 20years
ago because someone got scammed buying something online.

Countries like Switzerland and Singapore created and will further create a
legal structure to connect the real world transactions to the tokens.

Sure some countries will ban it, just like China has banned free internet
access, this doesn't mean that free internet access is bad.

~~~
empath75
Name one ICO that has backed a legitimate, on-going, profit-making business,
beyond selling ico tokens.

~~~
mrwong
ICO sales took of this summer, early stage startups usually, so would be naive
to think that most of them should be profitable already.

But here are a two.

Startup that issues you a Mastercard that is backed by your BTC, ETC. So you
can shop at any store that accepts CCs, but never hold actual Fiat currencies.
You recieve tokens as a form of cashback for your CC revenue. And all
tokenholder get a share of all the revenue that happens on all the TenX issued
CCs. [https://www.tenx.tech/](https://www.tenx.tech/)

An online casino that shares it profits with the tokenholders (shareholders)
[https://www.edgeless.io/#!/index](https://www.edgeless.io/#!/index)

~~~
alexasmyths
"ICO sales took of this summer"

They're almost all flat.

Why does anyone think that anyone will be interested in buying 'Kin' tokens?

These tokens are magic numbers that someone made up.

You people are buying Monopoly money. Worse - Monopoly money is at least made
of paper you could use for something possibly.

Kik's Kin tokens are way down, and they are not coming back up. Why on earth
would they?

Billions of people around the world are going to start sinking all their money
into thousands of fantasy tokens that have no use, and have no value? I don't
think so.

------
js4
Who cares.

The protocol has so many other issues.

Anyone who has worked with ETH will tell you that it isn’t really designed as
a currency.

A large chunk of the transactions are exchanged who must transfer deposits to
other addresses.

This is a hack that everyone does because Ethereum doesn’t allow you to send
from multiple addresses reliably.

Also tracking deposits from contracts is a nightmare. The nodes don’t work
well at scale. Contracts can’t be changes (so you have things like the issues
with parity multi sig contracts).

The list goes on and on.

~~~
Buttes
[https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/19640/how-to-
se...](https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/19640/how-to-send-from-
multiple-accounts-to-the-one-account-in-the-contract)

Hah wow you weren't kidding. Amateur hour.

To add to your list: no checksum for addresses. If you typo the recipient
address, the client will happily render your ether unspendable.

~~~
remcob
Ethereum doesn't use UTXO like Bitcoin, so there is no inherent need to spend
from multiple accounts. If you still want to do so, it's easy to write some
smart contracts that allow you to do this. I don't see the use-case though.

Also, there are checksums for addresses:
[https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-55.md](https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/blob/master/EIPS/eip-55.md)
I don't know anyone who would manually type an address though.

~~~
joosters
If you aren't meant to type in ethereum addresses, why does all the ethereum
software provide a textbox to let you type it in? Are they doing this to let
you shoot yourself in the foot? Are they plain malicious or just extremely
dumb?

While you may not know anyone who manually types in an address, there are
plenty of stories about people who do (and make a typo) on reddit & other
discussion boards.

~~~
Buttes
Literally they could have just copied BTC and implemented base58check from the
get go, it would take any competent programmer an hour or two tops. But it was
_too much work_ for the _MASTER PROGRAMMERS_ behind ethereum.

Not too much work to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, though. Ofc
something so simple is an EIP.

------
tromp
To support this high transaction rate, Ethereum is also growing the full node
storage requirements at an alarming rate:

[http://bc.daniel.net.nz/](http://bc.daniel.net.nz/)

~~~
shazow
Ethereum has a different blockchain design and ledger security properties than
Bitcoin, an archival node is not required for a similar level of security (and
is quite extraneous).

From Vitalik, on the link you shared:

> That chart is highly misleading. 300 GB is the size of a full archive node,
> which stores the history, present state and all historical states. The state
> itself is only ~1-2 GB and the history is ~10 GB. A pruned node would still
> store the full state and history, and so would be able to recompute any
> historical state if you really needed it, but it would only consume around
> 20 GB. If you only care about present state, you can go much lower.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6zcoja/10_gb_in_2...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6zcoja/10_gb_in_2_days_as_a_bitcoiner_serious_question/dmuglq3/?context=1)

More interesting details in this subthread:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6zcoja/10_gb_in_2...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6zcoja/10_gb_in_2_days_as_a_bitcoiner_serious_question/dmuht8y/?context=1)

~~~
gruez
>Ethereum has a different blockchain design and ledger security properties
than Bitcoin, an archival node is not required for a similar level of security
(and is quite extraneous).

doesn't bitcoin also have a feature similar to this? except bitcoin's pruned
node takes ~3GB rather than etherum's 20GB.

~~~
shazow
> doesn't bitcoin also have a feature similar to this? except bitcoin's pruned
> node takes ~3GB rather than etherum's 20GB.

No, not in the same way. A pruned Bitcoin node loses validation/state that you
can't reconstruct, it does not have the same security properties. See the
links in my comment.

~~~
TD-Linux
Yes, it is in the same way. In both cases you keep enough state to verify
future transactions but not enough to rebuild up to the current state if it
were to get corrupted. I don't see anything in your links that says otherwise.

~~~
makomk
The difference is that it's possible for new Etherium nodes to sync up using
just the current state without having to trust the node they got it from or
process the history, whereas new Bitcoin nodes have to either process the
entire transaction history themselves or trust someone to give them a valid
state copy. Also, pruned Bitcoin nodes are more analogous to Etherium nodes
which only store the current state without any history (~1GB according to that
link). I think the pruned nodes vbuterin talks about are roughly equivalent to
unpruned Bitcoin nodes.

~~~
TD-Linux
Nope, Ethereum fast sync has to trust that peers don't give it an invalid
state (it checks that all it's peers have the same state, but that is much
weaker protection). [https://github.com/ethereum/go-
ethereum/pull/1889](https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/pull/1889)

------
g09980
For those who don't follow the markets, ETH just cleared its all-time-high of
$420 about twenty minutes ago. This is a big deal because such numbers weren't
seen since June.

------
seansoutpost
This is really misleading. ETH may handle more than the top crypto m by market
cap, but Steemit and Bitshares dwarf all of these combined by number of
transactions.

~~~
CryptoPunk
Steemit and Bitshares aren't decentralized cryptocurrencies:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15766583](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15766583)

~~~
uhhhhhhh
Title: Ethereum Now Handles More Transactions Than All Digital Currencies
Combined

Digital currency does not require decentralization, not sure why you and
others keep bringing this up. They aren't claiming to be the biggest
decentralized, they're claiming to be the biggest digital currency period.

~~~
pakitan
You may be correct from a strictly technical point of view but then "digital
currency" becomes a meaningless term. After all, one could argue that USD is a
"digital currency" as well, given that cash transactions are a minuscule part
of all transactions. Also, I can easily devise a "digital currency" which
handles billions of tx/s...between address A and address B.

~~~
uhhhhhhh
One could argue you can stretch any term to mean something and then it becomes
meaningless. That doesn't make the argument valid.

In your case, you're wrong because Digital Currency means "Only Digital",
where the form of exchange is of information not something physical. FIAT
currencies are pretty much all excluded by definition.

Digital currency is the criteria THEY specified. When making vague hand wavey
claims to your superiority, you should expect people to point out how silly it
is to make vague hand wavey claims and how that usually means the claim is BS.

If they wanted to compare to decentralized blockchain based p2p currency then
they should have said that. They didn't, so any digital currency that beats
them in transactions proves them wrong.

Its really not that hard to make truthful statements. "We're the highest
transaction decentralized digital currency on the market". One additional word
to clarify and no one here is arguing this point.

------
chanfest22
These 24h transaction volumes are simply not correct.

[https://www.cointracker.network/rates](https://www.cointracker.network/rates)

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heheocoenev
This is wrong. bitshares and steem both handle more tx’s than ethereum.

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billylindeman
This is wrong. STEEM has the highest transaction rate

------
viach
Does it also mean that Ethereum blockchain size is growing faster than all
digital currencies combined?

------
lee101
Looking like ethereum is very mature technology these days, it's the companies
and smart contracts that are built on ethereum that are a risk now, much like
Bitcoin how we have centralization from having exchanges or wallets like coin
base everyone uses.

Keep up to date with the live forecasts at
[https://bitbank.nz](https://bitbank.nz)

Ethereum doing fairly well recently

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rothbardrand
Saw an analysis awhile back that over %60 of Ethereum transactions are from a
mixer. So artificial.

------
koksikus
steem handles more transactions than top 20 combined. I like how they ignore
half of the market.

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EGreg
More than Ripple? Can someone substantiate this claim with data?

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marmalade92
I see so many 0.01 ETH transactions, are those included?

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jstewartmobile
HN is in bad shape when blatant clickbait like this makes it to the top.

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kapauldo
Is there any way to know which transactions are for goods and services and
which are for speculation? That is a necessary number to interpret this
headline.

