When Satoshi Nakamoto introduced Bitcoin in the 2008 white paper, he described BTC as a “peer-to-peer electronic cash system”. Bitcoin was intended to be a digital payment system that enables transactions between “peers”, i.e. network participants.
However, it quickly became clear that Bitcoin’s technical design was not capable of handling global payments at all. While PayPal, for example, managed 193 transactions per second (TPS), Bitcoin managed just seven.
That sounds disastrous. Nevertheless, the network has been growing unabated for years. How does this fit together and can BTC ever become a currency?
How Bitcoin compares to other payment methods
VisaNet
Visa’s payment system claims to process 76,000 transactions per second (TPS).
PayPal
PayPal has a TPS volume of 193. The company, which was once founded by Elon Musk, is also increasingly establishing itself as a crypto player. In the summer of 2023 we received news that PayPal was incorporating a fiat-crypto interface into its app. However, the feature is initially reserved for US customers.
Solana
Solana (SOL) is considered the fastest blockchain in the world. It is capable of up to 50,000 Process transactions per second. In addition, Solana was recently able to overtake Ethereum as the most used blockchain in the world. BTC-ECHO reported.
Bitcoin
The BTC blockchain can do a maximum seven transactions per second. Currently, around 500,000 transactions are processed per day on the digital gold. For comparison: According to Visa, in 2022 it averaged 707 million transactions per day, more than a hundred times as much.
With seven transactions per second, Bitcoin cannot compete with established payment methods. You can read whether the project has failed and what payment expert Dr. Jonas Groß from the Digital Euro Association has to say about it in the current Bitcoin Report.
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