Capacity Metrics
Capacity Metrics This document has been assembled to share metrics for Bitcoin SV, with the aim to harmonize the values of metrics that are used in published materials.
One of the primary goals of Bitcoin SV is to “scale the block size”, but what does this mean? What we actually mean is “scaling capacity”.
The capacity of the Bitcoin network has been constrained for many years due to the decisions made by the developers of the primary Bitcoin node. The particular limit that constrained the capacity was the “maximum block size” which was 1 Megabyte. This is why the discussion has focused on block size, but this is not really the right metric.
The most suitable metric for measuring the capacity of Bitcoin SV is “the number of transactions per second” (or “tps”). As we continue removing the limits on the size of blocks that can be processed by Bitcoin SV, we should move to describing capacity in terms of “transactions per second” instead of “block size”.
As Bitcoin SV has released the restrictions on transactions, we also start to see different types of transactions, including data transactions. Data transactions are up to 300 times as large as payment transactions. For this reason, we also consider a balanced mix of transactions.
| colspan="2" ! | colspan="2" ! Block Size | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| tps | tx/day | payments | balanced |
| 5 | 432,000 | 1.2 MB (BTC) | 102 MB |
| 130 | 11 million | 31.2 MB (BCH) | 2.6 GB |
| 520 | 45 million | 125 MB (BSV Nov 18) | 11 GB |
| 1000 | 86 million | 240 MB | 20 GB |
| 9,000 | 777 million | 2.16 GB (BSV Quasar) | 184 GB |
| 10,000 | 864 million | 2.4 GB | 205 GB |
| 50,000 | 4 billion | 11.1 GB | 0.9 TB |
| 100,000 | 9 billion | 25 GB | 2 TB |
| 200,000 | 17 billion | 47 GB | 4 TB |
| 4,000,000 | 345 billion | 0.96 TB | 82 TB |
Calculations Calculations assume a block every 10 minutes. To achieve 1 tps, we need 600 transactions in a block.
Payment transactions are small, we use an average of 400 bytes per transactions.
Balanced transactions are a mix of 30% payment transactions (400 bytes), 40% medium transactions (10,000 bytes), and 30% large transactions (100,000 bytes). This results in an approximate average size of 34,120 bytes.