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Ethereum Will Match Visa In Scale In a 'Couple of Years,' Says Founder (techcrunch.com)
Ethereum's founder, Vitalik Buterin, believes that his cryptocurrency has the potential to replace things like credit card networks and gaming servers. He even goes as far to say that Ethereum will replace Visa in "a couple of years," though he later clarified that "ethereum *will have Visa-scale tx capacity*, not that it will 'replace Visa.'" TechCrunch reports: "There's the average person who's already heard of bitcoin and the average person who hasn't," he said. His project itself builds upon that notion by adding more utility to the blockchain, thereby creating something everyone will want to hear about. "Where Ethereum comes from is basically you take the idea of crypto economics and the kinds of economic incentives that keeps things like bitcoin going to create decentralized networks with memory for a whole bunch of applications," he said. "A good blockchain application is something that needs decentralization and some kind of shared memory." That's what he's building and hopes others will build on the Ethereum network.
Right now the network is a bit too slow for most mainstream applications. "Bitcoin is processing a bit less than 3 transactions per second," he said. "Ethereum is doing five a second. Uber gives 12 rides a second. It will take a couple of years for the blockchain to replace Visa." Buterin doesn't think everything should run on the blockchain but many things can. As the technology expands it can grow to replace many services that require parallelization -- that is programs that should run at the same time.
Right now the network is a bit too slow for most mainstream applications. "Bitcoin is processing a bit less than 3 transactions per second," he said. "Ethereum is doing five a second. Uber gives 12 rides a second. It will take a couple of years for the blockchain to replace Visa." Buterin doesn't think everything should run on the blockchain but many things can. As the technology expands it can grow to replace many services that require parallelization -- that is programs that should run at the same time.
Ethereum currently does 5 transactions per second.
Wikipedia tells me VISA can manage up to 56,000 per second - and that was "a couple of years" ago, so it can no doubt manage more than that now.
So, in "a couple of years" the Ethereum processing is going to scale by a factor of (more than) 11,000?
If you think that's true then I've got a wonderful Olympic stadium to sell you...
He was misquoted, and in fact has explicitly said so on twitter that he was misquoted and provided his original quote:
http://www.globalcryptopress.c...
The 10 minute delay for new block creation is to prevent blockchain forking so work isn't done on orphaned blocks, it's partly to correct for network latency. It is mostly a matter of hashing efficiency and also preventing the larger pools from forking the chain constantly. Ethereum corrects for this by allowing these blocks to be part of the reward, they call these 'uncles'. I suspect in the long term the 'uncle' concept will be Ethereum's down fall.