Paper 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.
Note: No CAPS in title. Added reference + 2 remarks for convenience in sec 3.1.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Applications
- Publication info
- Preprint. MINOR revision.
- Keywords
- maximal throughputbitcoin protocolblockchainupper bound
- Contact author(s)
- egeorg @ mathcognify com
- History
- 2019-04-29: last of 2 revisions
- 2019-04-24: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2019/416
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2019/416,
author = {Evangelos Georgiadis},
title = {How many transactions per second can bitcoin really handle ? Theoretically.},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2019/416},
year = {2019},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/416}
}
