
US academics say their shardy blockchain will be 10X faster than Visa - wyem
https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/01/17/us-academics-say-their-shardy-blockchain-will-be-10x-faster-than-visa/
======
tyingq
_" hope it will be able to process as many as 10,000 transactions per second,
which far surpasses Visa’s capability to process around 1,700"_

I think somebody got bad info about VISA's capabilities. 1700/tps is probably
their average tps over a day...solely based on needs/demands...not what it
could do. Not the peak, and not the edge of their performance envelope. It's
likely they can already handle much more than the proposed 10k/sec of this
sharded block chain.

Edit: Yep...pretty sure someone started with "Visa does roughly 150M
transactions a day"[1] then did 150,000,000 / 24 / 60 / 60 = ~ 1736

[1] [https://mybroadband.co.za/news/security/190348-visanet-
handl...](https://mybroadband.co.za/news/security/190348-visanet-
handling-100000-transactions-per-minute.html)

~~~
chill1
Those are old numbers. According to the VISA Annual Report from 2017, the VISA
network does ~3500 transactions per second (tps) (average) [0] and a
"FactSheet" put out by VISA claims 65,000 peak tps [1].

And AliPay had ~325,000 peak tps according to their 2017 annual report [2].

[0]
[https://s1.q4cdn.com/050606653/files/doc_financials/annual/2...](https://s1.q4cdn.com/050606653/files/doc_financials/annual/2017/Visa-2017-Annual-
Report.pdf)

[1]
[https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visan...](https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visanet-
technology/aboutvisafactsheet.pdf)

[2]
[https://www.alibabagroup.com/en/news/press_pdf/p180201.pdf](https://www.alibabagroup.com/en/news/press_pdf/p180201.pdf)

~~~
marknadal
If you were able to quickly find these numbers, and if those "academics" can't
get latest facts right...

Good golly, articles like this drive me nuts. False future hyped promise.

My team __shipped __over the last 4 years, and our system has already done
~3300 transactions per second (tps) (average) __in production __on $99 worth
of P2P hardware.

Internet Archive, top 300 global site, is also running it in production as
well. I just gave a talk there about how to do distributed load testing in a
decentralized network:
[https://youtu.be/hYH2Z1A0x3c?t=3635](https://youtu.be/hYH2Z1A0x3c?t=3635)

More info about production-ready use cases at
[https://github.com/amark/gun](https://github.com/amark/gun) .

------
StacyC
“The mainstream public is aware that these networks don’t scale.”

The mainstream public is barely aware that these networks exist.

~~~
sonnyblarney
More importantly I don't see any reason why VISA couldn't scale arbitrarily to
accommodate however many transactions.

~~~
cle
In distributed systems, there are almost always bottlenecks hiding right
behind the system's empirical limit.

~~~
sonnyblarney
My point is that scale and speed of transaction doesn't seem to be VISA's
problem.

VISA et. al. have scaled massively over the last 20 years, in ways that would
have been unimaginable before.

Given that a VISA is just a 'number' with some 'info' on it, I don't see what
any existential bottlenecks might be.

Maybe some things were centralized, but now are distributed ...

But given that each VISA is issued by a financial entity like a bank, which
can manage it like any other account ... I just don't see the problem here.

I don't want to trounce creative thinking but most of this blockchains stuff
is just academic for now.

------
deweller
I applaud this effort as an academic project. Hopefully it will help move
forward the state of the art. But I reject the idea that a new cryptocurrency
will "fix the bitcoin problem" by just being faster.

But there are already several blockchains that promise high transactions per
second such as Neo, Eos, Nano, etc. And Ripple, which has been around
significantly longer than these, claims to be able to handle 50k transactions
per second.

Cryptocurrencies need a lot of adoption and real world use to be successful.
Beware of premature optimization.

~~~
baby
Here's what you need:

* faster processing (and confirmation if you're forking)

* smaller blockchains (solved by coda protocol)

* insurances for light-weight wallets (solved by coda protocol)

* not computationally heavy (solved by algorand)

After that, real-world use-cases will follow. If bitcoin had been invented
before online banking, it would have boomed. The fact that it came later puts
a lot of pressure on innovation in this space. If it fails to innovate, we
won't hear about blockchains in the future.

------
g45y45
Prediction, sharded blockchains will never take off. With newer blockchain
protocols like MimbleWimble, you do not need to store the full transaction
details for all time. Too many things to go wrong, too brittle...

This is a much better scalability technique on a single blockchain -- taking
advantage of zk-proofs and EC point encoding. If you want distributed
computation also, ala Eth/EOS, you could combine a zk-proof of computation
with the MW tx encoding with no loss of generality.

~~~
qnsi
prediction: blockchain will never take off

~~~
g45y45
sorry, but it already has. Censorship resistant money aka Bitcoin exists and
works today!

~~~
swarnie_
Bitcoin is something i only ever read about. I work in tech and consider
myself quite savvy. Never have i needed to own crypto or to make a transaction
using crypto as the exchange media.

Explain how its "taken off already"?

~~~
jacoblambda
Never have I needed to either however I almost always see a way to use some
common cryptocurrency whenever I decide to pay for something or make a
donation. In that sense I think it has taken off. You don't have to use it for
anything however you can for most everything.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
>it will be able to process as many as 10,000 transactions per second, which
far surpasses Visa’s capability to process around 1,700.

According to Visa

VisaNet handles an average of 150 million transactions every day and is
capable of handling more than 24,000 transactions per second.
([https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/small-business-
tools/...](https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/small-business-
tools/retail.html))

------
blunte
I guess my unpleasant exposure to this domain has affected my brain, because I
first read "shady blockchain"... Aren't most of them? Whoops!

------
_-___________-_
Is Visa’s network not fast enough? I’ve never had problems with the amount of
time the transaction takes when paying for something with my Visa cards.

~~~
mcintyre1994
They're probably comparing to it because it often comes up in critiques of
current cryptos - which are incredibly slow compared to Visa.

------
justin66
Cryptocurrency's reputation being what it is, they will hopefully come up with
a descriptor that is less similar to "shady."

~~~
mikestew
Yeah, I was going to go with the ol' "I read it as..." and suffer the
downvotes. But in this case I think it apropos. Because I did, in fact, read
it as "shady blockchain" and where as I would normally stop and say, "wait,
that can't be right...", in this case I just kept on reading without skipping
a beat.

------
deckar01
This article does not explain why sharding the history reduces the time it
takes for a transaction to end up in a block. It also does not mention that
this delay is exacerbated by the standard practice of waiting for several
blocks to be mined on top of a transaction to reduce the chances of a fork
that renders it invalid.

------
deckar01
This article is less informative than the one it is citing.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-17/mit-
stanf...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-17/mit-stanford-
academics-design-cryptocurrency-to-better-bitcoin)

------
exrook
For anyone interested in more information, I found the research paper[0] and
website for the currency named "Unit-e"[1]. The paper seems to be quite
extensive at 168 pages long and covers a lot more than the blockchain design.

[0] [https://dtr.org/wp-
content/uploads/2019/01/2019-01-16-Decent...](https://dtr.org/wp-
content/uploads/2019/01/2019-01-16-Decentralized-Payment-Systems-Principles-
and-Design.pdf) [1] [https://dtr.org/unit-e/](https://dtr.org/unit-e/)

------
loomstate
Projects like Zilliqa have a massive head start

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
Yes I thought this article was going to be about Zilliqa, which is also
created by academics, has sharding, and is releasing its mainnet at the end of
this month.

------
sonnyblarney
Blockchain solves yet another non-problem!

Next up: "Blockhain makes it easier to press the button on your blender"

~~~
baby
If Bitcoin was released before online banking, would you have said the same?

~~~
sonnyblarney
"If Bitcoin was released before online banking, would you have said the same?"

That's a non-sequitor, because as long as the world is 'online' there can
effectively be 'online banking'.

And of course we need 'online' to have Bitcoin.

Are you suggesting people did Bitcon by mail?

One day we might find something useful for it to do, but not for a while.

Let's stop wasting vast amounts of electricity until we figure out something
useful for it to do, as of today, there are none.

~~~
baby
> That's a non-sequitor, because as long as the world is 'online' there can
> effectively be 'online banking'.

Of course, but online banking has been bad for a very long time (it's still
bad in the US, you can't easily transfer money around compared to Europe).
Bitcoin was effectively better than banking before a certain point in history,
and worked out of the box without all the banking infrastructure, it would
have won back then.

> Let's stop wasting vast amounts of electricity until we figure out something
> useful for it to do, as of today, there are none.

It shows that you know nothing about cryptocurrencies. The innovation and
current research in the field tackles, among other issues, the energy issue of
bitcoin. (Check Algorand for an example.)

------
gammateam
ITT: my favorite blockchain that my favorite youtube guru happened to expose
me to first is the best solution, and all others are scams because I was
exposed to them second

so basically religion.

