There are massive benefits to gain from the world adopting digital alternatives to cash. Most people today are relying on a system of trust, liabilities, and assets with a banking system to handle their cash. Individuals pay overly large fees in order to participate in these systems, but we could use modern digital technology to eliminate much of the unnecessary financial banking industry. We've seen optimistic tech enthusiasts talk about our future using cryptocurrencies, but what are they missing? Why are all current cryptocurrencies so hopelessly broken? Why aren't digital currencies completely replacing our use of cash, debit, or credit cards? # Transaction Volume and Speed A good currency must allow people to spend their money. We have to be able to confirm a transaction within moments, and any fees that go into using the system need to be microscopically small compared to our purchases. What does this kind of performance look like for us currently, and in the future? With our current global population under 10 billion, at least half which are old enough to be making daily purchases[1](#a1), it is reasonable to estimate a few billion transactions per day, or tens of thousands of transactions per second. This is a solved problem with current databases and banking networks, companies like Visa or Paypal are famously already capable of processing this much data securely and instantly[2](#a2). Hilariously, the well known titan Bitcoin faces a hard cap of 10-20 transactions per second if everything works perfectly, and ideally takes an average of 10 minutes to confirm a payment if the network is running *optimally*. That means a country the size of Puerto Rico[3](#a3) could probably run an entirely local fork of Bitcoin without grinding to a halt. But these performance limitations are somewhat artificial. Its easy to envision a fork of Bitcoin that has twice the capacity, just double the block size. If 10 minutes is too long, we can just make it take 5 minutes by altering our mining puzzle. Why isn't this a solution to our problem? # Soft Fork, Hard Fork, Red Fork, Blue Fork So what else are people trying to catch up with existing centralized database volume? # Trust Us, We're Same-Same, But Different # Unending Database Bloat 1: http://gsociology.icaap.org/report/demsumAging.html [↩](#a1) 2: https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visanet-technology/aboutvisafactsheet.pdf [↩](#a2) 3: https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/time-series/demo/popest/2010s-total-puerto-rico.html [↩](#a3)