Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…— then a billion users. If there’s, what, 100,000 seconds in a day, if each user does 10 clicks per day, on average, then I think that gets you a million transactions per second, ballpark. The math works out as a sanity check there. “Big thing,” I think, means millions of transactions per second ideally. Maybe you can get away with a little bit less, but it’s got to be a lot, certainly. Then you say, “Well, okay, what’s that mean for a blockchain?” Well, it means that if you want a blockchain to really get to a truly global scale, you want that blockchain to be processing millions of transactions a second. That’d be great if you could do that. What does that require, then? Well, straightforwardly, it requires technology that can parse that, and we don’t have that on very many blockchains right now. If you look at most blockchains today, they cannot support millions of transactions per second. Ethereum cannot support millions of transactions per second. Today, it can support ten. Ten is the number of transactions per second it can support. Ten is off by six orders of magnitude from where it needs to get. It’s not close. Now, it’s going to get operated to Eth2 sometime over the next few years, let’s say, at which point it’s going to get to something like thousands of transactions per second, per shard. The first point I want to make is thousands is still not nearly enough. Thousands would mean that it could not host a single active order book on FTX for the entire blockchain, let alone Facebook. So, thousands isn’t going to get you there, but it’s going to shard. What sharding means, basically, is there’s going to be a bunch of them running in parallel and periodically syncing up with each other. If you had a hundred of those, if you had a thousand of those, I guess, you’re at millions of transactions a second collectively, but they don’t talk to each other super well. So you’ve got a single-digit thousands per shard, millions overall. Does that work? Is that enough? Maybe. I would be pretty nervous about that, and the reason is that, basically, you can’t take a single order book and shard it. You can’t have two people trying to lift the same offer from different shards, and 30 minutes later figure out what happened. In fact, if you tweet, and I was like, “Ah, I can’t see your tweet.” I’m on Twitter shard number 78. You’re on Twitter shard number 331. Of course, I can’t see your tweet. It’s not a great user experience. Certainly companies, and maybe even industries — you want on a single shard, so I think you want millions of TPS [transactions per second] per shard if you are going to shard it. And that, basically, gets me to where I am, which is, when you’re looking at the type of things that could scale to support gigantic billion-person applications online, I think you’re looking at a very limited number of blockchains that are focusing very heavily on their scaling. Now, I think the best French fries in the world are in southern Argentina, in Patagonia. Where do you think they are? Oh, I’ve got to say, I like a lot of French fries.…

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