Since its inception, there have been questions surrounding bitcoin’s ability to scale effectively. Transactions involving the digital currency bitcoin are processed, verified, and stored within a digital ledger known as a blockchain. Blockchain is a revolutionary ledger-recording technology. It makes ledgers far more difficult to manipulate because the reality of what has transpired is verified by majority rule, not by an individual actor. Additionally, this network is decentralized; it exists on computers all over the world.The problem with blockchain technology in the Bitcoin network is that it’s slow, especially in comparison to banks that deal with credit card transactions. Popular credit card company Visa, Inc. (V), for instance, processes close to 150 million transactions per day, averaging roughly 1,700 transactions per second. The company's capability actually far surpasses that, at 65,000 transaction messages per second.1
How many transactions can the bitcoin network process per second? Seven.2 Transactions can take several minutes or more to process. As the network of bitcoin users has grown, waiting times have become longer because there are more transactions to process without a change in the underlying technology that processes them.Ongoing debates around bitcoin’s technology have been concerned with this central problem of scaling and increasing the speed of the transaction verification process. Developers and cryptocurrency miners have come up with two major solutions to this problem. The first involves making the amount of data that needs to be verified in each block smaller, thus creating transactions that are faster and cheaper, while the second requires making the blocks of data bigger, so that more information can be processed at one time. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) developed out of these solutions. Below, we'll take a closer look at how bitcoin and BCH differ from one another.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Bitcoin is limited by transaction processing time, an issue which has caused rifts between factions within the bitcoin mining and developing communities.
Bitcoin Cash was started by bitcoin miners and developers concerned about the future of the bitcoin cryptocurrency, and its ability to scale effectively.
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