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0 pointsmbar844y ago0 comments

I'm pointing to the foundational problem that led to the Big vs Small block debate in the context of Bitcoin and which is the argument for second layer networks.

Presumably you've come across this question in your four years of development and would have exact numbers (perhaps not for my chosen value of tx/sec) already at hand. The fact that we're three comments deep into this, leads me to believe you are dancing around the question.

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dvdplm4y ago

There’s no dancing going on. He said he doesn’t know the exact numbers but is asking the engineers to dig it up for you. Please don’t be rude and please don’t put words in other people’s mouth.

mbar84OP4y ago

As I say, this is a foundational issue that every blockchain project should address. Before I asked my initial question, I searched the documentation to see if it had been addressed. Such answers might be a second layer story, or some form of transaction aggregation on the base layer blockchain. I could not find anything that obviously looked like that.

At this point I think it's perfectly fair to start with the assumption that a new Crypto is a scam and it needs to do the legwork to show that it isn't. To claim that a blockchain (the most ludicrously inefficient data-structure ever devised) can scale to a billion users is an outrageous claim. The technical means they found overcome this problem should be front and center in their documentation.

josh26004y ago

I am going to do an AMA over at r/signal on Tuesday at 10am; please save questions for over there as I have to get back to work. I'll say this: the punchline here, as I'm sure you're aware, is that there are limitations to layer 1 scaling. We haven't discovered those limits at MobileCoin, but they surely exist.

The question becomes: what is tx throughput at N billion users? What are the scaling strategies that will get us there? It is zk-rollups (or zk-zk rollups)? Is it sharding? Is it moving to custom hardware circuits? I suspect it will be some combination of all of the above.

We don't know what the answer is yet and we will devote tremendous resources to figuring it out. I don't want to give the impression that MobileCoin as it is written today will scale to Alipay levels of tx throughput, but I do believe there is a path to get there that requires a ton of work.

Does that answer your question?

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