if you wanna scale via big blocks, you'd have 190TB of data a year to support 24,000 transactions per second. No node can keep this much, not to mention syncing
Lightning solves this beautifully
The default LND node is able to do 33 payments per second on a 8vCPU 32GB memory cloud machine
Assuming most Pis running LND can do 4 payments a second, the Lightning Network right now should be able to scale to 16,264 payments a second.
That number is 2.2x the average transactions from Visa in 2021, so more than enough to overcome them
At the same time, Lightning's transaction fee is 13 times less than visa. 0.1% vs 1.29%
Lightning hasn't even started prioritizing scalability or performance. Reliability has been at the forefront
As River shared, its payment success rate is 98.7% at an average payment size of $46. 4 years ago, Lightning had $5 transactions fail 48% of the time.
Really interesting research, thank you! You might find this old report from Joost Jager at Bottlepay interesting re: benchmarking tps for a given node.
Would love to see somebody redo the analysis and see what the theoretical maximum looks like today!
Thanks! His reports are exactly what I was referencing.
I tried to be realistic with the numbers I presented. The benchmark you linked is more proof that higher throughput per node is achievable, but none of what he did has made its way to the implementations (with reason I suspect, there are tradeoffs at each point)
A benchmark from Bottlepay again, a month or so earlier than this one, showed that an LND node running decent hardware (8vCPU, 32GB RAM) can do 33 payments per second.
I wanted to estimate this in a realistic way given that most of the network is running Pis, and ran with the conservative "4 tps" number, which again proves more than enough!
ive been using it since yesterday after opening a Phoenix wallet and its amazing to be able to just log into this site with no friction. Just scan a QR code. Also I assume money is being sent to the devs just by replying and interacting with the platform which seems like a much better model than ads.
I enjoyed writing and researching this a lot.
A short summary:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/.image/c_limit%2Ccs_srgb%2Cq_auto:good%2Cw_700/MTkzOTM1NjA2NjU1NjI0ODgx/transactions-per-second.webp
Really interesting research, thank you! You might find this old report from Joost Jager at Bottlepay interesting re: benchmarking tps for a given node.
Would love to see somebody redo the analysis and see what the theoretical maximum looks like today!
Thanks! His reports are exactly what I was referencing.
I tried to be realistic with the numbers I presented. The benchmark you linked is more proof that higher throughput per node is achievable, but none of what he did has made its way to the implementations (with reason I suspect, there are tradeoffs at each point)
A benchmark from Bottlepay again, a month or so earlier than this one, showed that an LND node running decent hardware (8vCPU, 32GB RAM) can do 33 payments per second.
I wanted to estimate this in a realistic way given that most of the network is running Pis, and ran with the conservative "4 tps" number, which again proves more than enough!
"solved" and "scalability" don't go together.
Ln is a good start but it’s not battle tested and full of bugs.
ive been using it since yesterday after opening a Phoenix wallet and its amazing to be able to just log into this site with no friction. Just scan a QR code. Also I assume money is being sent to the devs just by replying and interacting with the platform which seems like a much better model than ads.
But onboarding users to Lightning is still a layer 1 bottleneck without additional solutions like fedimint where multiple users share a UTXO.
or centralized companies, like most wallets/Strike/etc. which I suspect will be the thing adopted by mainstream
Scales payments, not users.