Transactions Speeds: How Do Cryptocurrencies Stack Up To Visa or PayPal?

Cryptocurrency bag holders often boast that their network transaction speeds are faster than mainstream payment methods, such as Visa or Paypal. As cryptocurrencies continue to rise in popularity, it will be important to determine which blockchain payment networks could eventually become the “new Visa.” While both sides continue to debate their arguments, we jumped through the hard data and created a unique visual to highlight transaction speeds across several different payment networks.





We chose to compare the transaction speeds of some of the largest cryptocurrencies by market-cap relative to Visa and PayPal. Each payment network is ranked largest-to-smallest based on the size of their balloon, which equates to the number of transactions per second. The larger the balloon, the more transactions their payment network can process per second. This allows for a clear and concise visual to show once and for all how some of the most popular crytpocurrencies stack up to more traditional payment methods.


Ripple Shows Potential, But Visa is Still the King of Speed

As you can see, Visa still has the fastest transaction speeds over any other payment networks measured, with 24,000 transactions per second. It was surprising to see Ripple come in second and beat out PayPal by a whopping 1,307 transactions per second. This shows that Ripple may have the capability to be a viable payment solution on a much larger scale.


PayPal had 218 million active users during the third quarter of 2017. PayPal is still among the most popular and well-known digital peer-to-peer platforms out there, but Ripple’s transaction speed dominance could be the key to a next-generation peer-to-peer payment platform that is not only faster, but also safer.


Our data shows that Bitcoin Cash has the second fastest transaction speed of the major cryptos. Maybe this will finally give Bitcoin Cash the proper respect and recognition as the second most viable crypto for transaction speeds. To be fair to Charlie Lee (Litecoin creator) and his loyal Litecoin followers, four transactions less per second is a close margin of speed and does deserve recognition.


Those of us who are actively vested within the cryptocurrency space are not shocked to see Dash, Bitcoin and Ethereum bringing up the rear. Crypto traders are consistently hit with transaction delays when they go to transfer their Ether or Bitcoin, as their growing popularity outpaces their network’s processing capabilities.


Here is a breakdown of the chart, which includes each network’s number of transactions per second data results:


1. Visa: 24,000 transactions

2. Ripple: 1,500 transactions

3. PayPal: 193 transactions

4. Bitcoin Cash: 60 transactions

5. Litecoin: 56 transactions

6. Dash: 48 transactions

7. Ethereum: 20 transactions

8. Bitcoin: 7 transactions


Overall, Visa continues to have one of the fastest transactions speeds across several different payment networks. Keep in mind that cryptocurrency and blockchain technology is still in the very early stages.


Visa was founded in 1958 and has had 60 years to improve and grow its payment network capabilities. Imagine if we give Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and other cryptocurrencies 60 years to develop their networks, the data may not be so skewed in Visa’s favor.


For now, cryptocurrency pioneers continue deeper into uncharted territory in search of faster speeds, improved network stability, and user adoption.

Learn even more from HowMuch.net here: https://howmuch.net/articles/crypto-transaction-speeds-compared

By Stephanie Russell-Kraft 

Big Law Business

Dax Hansen founded Perkins Coie’s blockchain practice group long before the digital transaction and record-keeping platform was heralded as a game-changer. That was in 2013. Today, blockchain is best known as the network that enables buying and selling of bitcoin.


But it’s also beginning to enter the tech and business mainstream, with leading companies investing in its potential and Big Law also starting to take a stake of its own.“It was not as sexy in 2012 or 2013,” said Hansen, who focuses his practices on IT, payments and international business transactions.


“Lawyers like shiny things, and so there has been a huge spike in interest in blockchain law, especially over the last year,” said Hansen.Blockchain’s technology is the foundation for so-called smart contracts, which are self-executing. Terms and conditions of money, property or share exchanges are digitally written into the agreement.


The technology is open-source and peer-to-peer, meaning records aren’t kept by a third party. Proponents believe potential blockchain applications go far beyond the cryptocurrency world, and could have an internet-like, transformational effect on the way business will be transacted across sectors, from healthcare to finance.


Corporations are investing, experimenting and integrating. MasterCard in 2017 began offering businesses the ability to send money over a blockchain. This week, IBM and a unit of telecommunications giant Comcast threw their weight behind a blockchain investment start-up fund. Banks are looking at blockchain as are Wall Street investors.


Global regulators, too, are training their eyes on the technology.All this attention on contracts, investment, business application and potential regulation has lawyers at big law firms building or working on blockchain’s legal implications.


Perkins Coie’s blockhain practice has quadrupled to 40 lawyers in five years. Hansen estimates each spends anywhere from a third to all of their time working on blockchain matters.


Morrison & Foerster counsel Joshua Ashley Klayman said she became interested in blockchain after hearing from banks that they were considering smart contracts as a way to reduce legal spend.She and another attorney launched a blockchain task force in the firm’s finance practice 2016.


“When I started the group here, there was a concern as to whether this was going to be a real thing or whether it was something that was just interesting,” Klayman told Big Law business.Now, the answer seems clear. Klayman’s task force has since turned into the MoFo blockchain and smart contracts practice group, which currently includes over 70 lawyers.


Like the potential reach of the technology, the legal questions are widespread.“I feel like everybody is talking about blockchain like an industry that needs to be separately regulated, where in fact blockchain is a technology that gets implemented in different industries,” said Lee Schneider, a partner at McDermott Will & Emery whose practice focuses on FinTech and blockchain technology.


“So if you’re going to use blockchain in healthcare, you need to figure out what health care laws apply, if you’re going to use it in the energy sector, you need to figure out what energy regulations apply,” he said.


For example, lawyers now are needed to help determine which laws apply when it comes to transferring digital tokens, and whether or when those tokens should be considered securities, commodities or currencies.The Securities and Exchange Commission intervened in an ICO at the end of 2017 and has offered some guidance on the issue, but no bright line test exists.


Lawyers also will be needed to determine rules for trading blockchain assets, to help structure new financial products, and to clarify how consumer protections apply to digital token sales.


Schneider said he spends a “fair amount of unbilled time” speaking with other lawyers across firms, academia and in-house to keep abreast of the changing interpretations.Many of these relationships are informal, but they’re also structured through several key groups.


Klayman leads the Wall Street Blockchain Alliance’s Legal Working Committee, one of the leading groups tackling legal questions around blockchain technology.


Klayman, Schneider and Hansen are all members of the legal industry working group of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), a 501(c)6 non-profit dedicated to helping business understand and implement Ethereum, a blockchain-based computing platform.


She said these collaborative groups have become a critical tool for lawyers navigating the legal implications of the new technology.“I’ve found it to be tremendously valuable to be able to share our thoughts across firms and to basically be able to come to some general understandings and interpretations of what we think are ‘safe’ positions and more risky ones,” said Klayman.


 “Having that kind of camaraderie across firms is relatively unique.”Hansen said the collaborative spirit stems in part from the collaborative, democratic nature of blockchain technology itself.“As a general principle, blockchain technology, distributed ledger technology, cryptocurrency, has a unifying effect on people,” he said. “It has a community influence.


”The lawyers who work in this emerging practice area tend to self-select because they are drawn to these ideals.“These are open platforms that anybody can participate in,” said Aaron Wright, a Cardozo Law professor.Wright heads the EEA’s legal industry working group.


“At least once a day I have a call with some firm and they’re interested in getting involved,” he said.Wright says the conversations taking place in these working groups are much like those you might expect in a bar committee, “except it’s not occurring in a bar committee.


”“The more people started looking at blockchain technologies, the more it became clear is that what we’re talking about is reimagining the way we do commerce,” said Wright. “A big part of that equation is the legal industry and lawyers.”


To contact the reporter responsible for this story:

Stephanie Russell-Kraft at [email protected].

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Casey Sullivan at [email protected] and John Crawley at [email protected].

Topics

Law Firms, Technology, Blockchain

TOPFor more legal resources, visit Bloomberg Law.


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8 January 2018 

The creator of the open-source blockchain platform Ethereum is exploring ways to fix an innate issue with the technology—the inability for processing capacity to effectively scale. And the Ethereum Foundation is seeking outside developers to help solve the scaling problem.


Ethereum and Hyperledger are the world’s leading blockchain platforms and the basis for a myriad number of applications, from cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum’s Ether to “smart” or self-executing online contracts.


While open and efficient because all transactions in the peer-to-peer distributed ledger technology can be seen in real time, one performance problem has been that every entry on a blockchain requires every node to process it.


This has the potential to slow transactions such as payments.Due to its chain nature, each new record inserted into a blockchain has to be serialised, which means that the rate of updates is slower than traditional databases, which can update data in parallel.


Expensive and slow


“This expensive and slow process is justifiable for a global network where all participants are potentially malicious,” Bharath Rao, founder of Ethereum exchange Leverj, said in an earlier interview with Computerworld. “In a corporate environment, where all participation is controlled, it does not make sense to spend a lot of energy and time for essentially no additional benefit.


”While requiring all nodes (servers) to process each transaction makes blockchain natively resilient to cyberattacks, as hundreds or thousands of nodes would have to be hacked to gain control of the network, it also slows transaction processing and, ultimately, its scalability.


Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin wrote that the blockchain network has reached one million transactions per day, and with both it and other blockchain projects frequently reaching their full transaction capacity, “the need for scaling progress is becoming more and more clear and urgent.


”Sharding

So far, Ethereum is exploring two possible fixes for the problem. The first, “sharding,” would require a small percentage of nodes to see and process every transaction, allowing many more transactions to be processed in parallel at the same time; sharding also is not expected to diminish the native security of a blockchain because it maintains “most of the desired decentralisation and security properties of a blockchain,” Buterin wrote.

Layer 2

The second solution involves creating data-link layers or “layer 2” protocols that send most transactions off-chain and only interact with the underlying blockchain in order to enter and exit from the layer-2 system, as well as in the case of attacks on the system. Layer 2 protocols transfer data between nodes within a LAN or an adjacent WAN.


A specification for an initial prototype is close to finalised, Buterin said, and a roadmap has been created that allows it to be slowly introduced into Ethereum—first as a “loosely coupled” sidechain anchored into the Ethereum base chain through a “validator manager contract,” later introducing tighter and tighter integration with the Ethereum base chain over time.


“A reference implementation is being built in python on top of Py-EVM, and a testnet in python is not too far away,” Buterin wrote.

External assistance

The Ethereum Foundation, however, wants outside developers to get involved in the next step: the sharding testnet and, following that, the sharding mainnet.


We want [them] to be a multi-client ecosystem right from the start, with the Ethereum Foundation not supporting any single privileged production implementation,” Buterin wrote.


To that end, Buterin said on top of working to solve the problem internally, Ethereum is offering subsidies to programmers who can help find the fixes; subsidies will range from $50,000 (€41,700) to $1 million (€834,000) depending on the scope of the work involved.


For developers, there will also the pride in knowing their work could be used in the next iteration of Ethereum’s blockchain.


Funded team

The Ethereum Foundation-funded research team will continue to build an implementation in python and possibly other languages, but this is intended as a reference and proof of concept first and foremost,” Buterin said. “While we aim to continue to focus heavily on research and specification, we do not want to ultimately ‘win’ the competition for which client gets the most actual users once the network goes live.


”The first step in applying to participate in the development project is to send an email to [email protected], with this information:

• Official name of project, applicant and core developers
• Further information on the team, including previous activity if any in the Ethereum or blockchain space or distributed systems, mechanism design or cryptography;
• Proposal and impact on scalability;
• Estimated timeline for development milestones and completion, request for grant amount and estimated total overall budget.

Read more: http://www.techcentral.ie/6FEi3#ixzz53ejnU5Bq

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Urban public transportation will become increasingly complex and crowded in the future, as the importance of mobility services like Uber and Lyft grows, and more companies look to leverage self-driving cars to launch autonomous ride-hailing services in cities. 


This could create an opportunity for a common payment mechanism that simplifies how consumers pay for the various mobility and mass transit services they use to get around urban areas.


Cryptocurrencies leveraging distributed ledgers and loaded onto prepaid transit cards would provide just such a digital payments mechanism that consumers could use to pay for ride-hailing, bus, and subway services, while creating transparency and trust among providers of those services, Amos Haggiag, CEO and co-founder of Optibus, a startup that provides a cloud-based analytics platform for mass transit systems, recently told BI Intelligence.



Consumers could use the cryptocurrency value on their card to pay for multi-modal transportation, enabling them, for instance, to take a trip part way on mass transit and part way on a bike-sharing or ride-hailing platform, and pay for the whole trip with one transaction on one card.


All those transactions would then be stored on a decentralized ledger, allowing all of the transportation providers to verify and view those transactions, and giving them valuable data into customers’ transportation habits.


Although such a decentralized approach would have important benefits for consumers and transportation companies, there are still significant barriers to enabling such cross-service transportation purchases for consumers via cryptocurrencies:

• Cryptocurrencies and the distributed ledger technology that supports them are still in very early phases of their technological development, according to Haggiag. This means that more progress needs to be made before distributed ledger technology can support mass transit systems.
• For example, Bitcoin transactions can take hours to validate, particularly when transaction volume is high, and a mass transit system would need instant validation of transactions, he explained. Other cryptocurrencies are making advances toward faster transaction validation, but more progress needs to be made.
• Additionally, the system would need to be able to validate transactions offline — something no blockchain is capable of today — in case internet access in a city faltered for any reason, so consumers would continue to be able to use the mass transit system.

Over time though, distributed ledger technology will likely overcome these challenges, and transportation providers will gain a major incentive to join together in a decentralized payments system for transportation services, Haggiag argues.


That incentive will be the digital data created by the transactions stored on the chain, which could give companies unprecedented insights into how urban dwellers move about their cities. Armed with such insights, companies will be able to optimize their transportation networks for local demand, which could greatly improve their efficiency and profitability.


Peter Newman, research analyst for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on the blockchain in the IoT that:

• Explains how firms are already exploring ways to make use of blockchain in all sorts of IoT projects.
• Provides an overview of disruption in critical sectors including the supply chain and asset management.
• Analyzes how blockchain is poised to see rapid expansion as a tool used in IoT solutions that reduce costs, increase efficiency, and remove reliance on cloud-based platforms.
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CLEAN CRYPTOCURRENCY

After the meteoric rise of Bitcoin in 2017, cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technology that underpins their circulation have come into the spotlight. And as bitcoin prices skyrocketed, so did the electricity bills of the people mining the cryptocurrency. Last year alone, the energy spent on bitcoin mining was higher than the average electricity consumed by 159 countries.


However, some investors believe it doesn’t have to be like that. Mining remains an energy intensive operation, but it can be powered by clean electricity.


The Spanish startup Pylon Network is launching its own “clean” cryptocurrency, Pylon coin, which will be used to exchange renewable energy.Members of the energy exchange platform will receive coins for each unit of energy generated from solar panels, and will be able to sell the excess to other users.


Gerard Bel, one of the founders of Pylon Network, told CoopNews that a system of servers called “green miners” is at the heart of the project.“The green miners are like servers validating transactions,” he said. “As in the case of bitcoin, the miners are big computers which solve the algorithm to secure the data.”


“In our case we will implement a secure miner with low-energy consumption,” he added, “and the energy used to run this server will come from excess renewable energy. The energy that was not used is used to maintain the servers.


”After a successful fundraising round, during which the startup distributed 3,250,000 pre-mined tokens to investors, the team launched an alpha version of its platform and is ready to go ahead with a demo this year. It will distribute smart meters across Spain, for people to measure their energy consumption in real time ahead of trading, and it’s already eyeing the U.K. and Germany as potential future markets.

CLIMATECOIN

The idea of exchanging clean energy through digital currency is not that dissimilar from the concept behind Climatecoin, which proposes to pay people who voluntarily offset carbon. In their pitch, the team from the blockchain-based platform CoinCircleexplained that “usually people rely on government for public goods problems.


But governments aren’t doing a very good job with the climate.”Decentralizing how we decrease carbon emissions, is a way to empower people to take direct action instead of getting frustrated by a sluggish international response to climate change, the developers observed.


Similarly to Pylon coin, Climatecoin would initially run on Ethereum to ease upfront development costs, so the team will be able to focus on paying for carbon offsets. Despite an ambitious plan to scale up operations, Climatecoin is still little more than a proof of concept, and the pathway towards paying for global decarbonization through cryptocurrency is fraught with uncertainties.


For instance, the very concept of offsetting carbon raises some serious questions. Many of the projects aimed at pulling greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, such as planting forests or turning waste into biogas, are difficult to regulate.


It may be a long time before we get to staple a carbon credit to a digital coin and kickstart a global carbon market, but an increasing number of investors are already betting on the power of blockchain to solve public goods problems like climate change.


Disclosure: Several members of the Futurism team, including the editors of this piece, are personal investors in a number of cryptocurrency markets. Their personal investment perspectives have no impact on editorial content.


Discover more reports from Futurism here: https://futurism.com/beyond-mining-blockchain-boosts-solar-exchange-markets/

Bitcoin isn’t exactly environmentally friendly right now. The Bitcoin network is largely powered by coalplants in China, according to Digiconomist. Bitcoin transactions in total emit as much carbon dioxideand greenhouse gases as some of the biggest coal-fired power plants in the world, according to LAGI.


 The Bitcoin network consumes more energy than many countries do. Digiconomist said Bitcoin could power 3,029,126 American households, and the country closest to Bitcoin when it comes to electricity consumption is Denmark.

Related: One Bitcoin transaction takes more energy than a household uses in a week




So what if we powered Bitcoin with solar arrays instead? They’d have to be pretty large. LAGI’s graphic shows in 2017, we’d need a solar array greater than the size of San Francisco. By the 2020s, when Bitcoin electricity consumption could escalate to over 500 TWh a year, we’d need an array that would sprawl from San Francisco to Sacramento, around two hours away by car.


LAGI said, “It seems that nearly all of our global efforts at green building design, energy efficiencyretrofits, demand side management, and renewable energy investment are being undone by the block-chain currency phenomenon…


Either Bitcoin must figure out a way to use less electricity, or it will cease to have value in a global economy that responsibly places a higher value on carbon emissions reductions than we do on the marginal benefits of cryptographic currencies.


”They said they targeted Bitcoin in their graphic, but the issue is also present in computing and data requirements.

Via the Land Art Generator Initiative