Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2019/416
How many transactions per second can bitcoin really handle ? Theoretically.
Evangelos Georgiadis
Abstract: Transactions are arguably the most important part in the bitcoin mechanism,
with everything else facilitating the proper creation, propagation and validation;
culminating with their addition to the public ledger – the blockchain. One crucial
measure inevitably intertwined with transactions is, throughput, the number of
transactions confirmed (or added to the blockchain) per second, or simply, tps.
Understanding throughput capacity from different angles remains of paramount
importance for gaining insights into the underlying infrastructure.
We compute the exact upper bound for the maximal transaction throughput of the
bitcoin protocol and obtain 27 tps. The previous best known bound for the average
transaction throughput is 7 tps. All results are based on legacy infrastructure, i.e.,
pre-SegWit era.
Category / Keywords: applications / maximal throughput, bitcoin protocol, blockchain, upper bound
Date: received 22 Apr 2019, last revised 28 Apr 2019
Contact author: egeorg at mathcognify com
Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation
Note: No CAPS in title.
Added reference + 2 remarks for convenience in sec 3.1.
Version: 20190429:033746 (All versions of this report)
Short URL: ia.cr/2019/416
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