We always hear people talking about how Bitcoin will eventually Fiat currencies, how you’ll be able to pay all your bills with crypto easily, without a ton of technical knowhow….well that clearly isn’t the situation yet, but how close are we to getting there. Transaction time is incredibly important for mainstream adoption; people want and need to able to pay for every day things securely and in a timely fashion. Can’t pay for something when it takes 20 minutes for the transaction to confirm can we. While Bitcoin has improved in these aspects, it still lags behind our current legacy payment protocols like credit cards and internet payment networks. Recent 2nd layer scaling solutions like Lightning Network have proposed new solutions for solving scaling issues that have plagued and divided the Bitcoin community for the past few years.

Anyhow, this graphic from the crew at howmuch.net. shows how the top cryptocurrencies (by marketcap) compare to VISA and PayPal in terms of transactions per second.

VISA leads the way, head and shoulders above the others with 24,000 processed transactions per second. Ripple coming in second at 1,500, PayPal with 193, Bitcoin Cash with 60, Litecoin at 56, Dash with 48, Ethereum at 20 (crypto kitties almost broke it lol) and Bitcoin at only 7. Hell, even DOGE has 33 transactions per second. It will be interesting to see where newer protocols land on this list, EOS in particular, with claims that it could scale much faster and handle a much larger transaction throughput than current cryptocurrencies.

So what say you…can Bitcoin scale enough to overtake VISA and/or Paypal in the near future? will lightning network be the key to achieving the volume and transactions speeds neccesary? Will sacrificing some security to improve speed be a wise decision? How will this affect bitcoin transaction fees?

As you can see we still have a ways to go and some important decisions to make.

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