Visa processes 1,600 transactions per second. PayPal processes 193 transactions per second. Bitcoin processes only 3-4 transactions per second. In order to fulfill the dreams of financial programming–in order to get decentralized, peer-to-peer micropayments–Bitcoin needs a much higher transaction throughput. Bitcoin’s scalability issues have led to debates within the community and changes in the software.

In this episode, Jordan Clifford gives an overview of some of the scaling limitations of Bitcoin, and discusses SegWit, a change to the Bitcoin protocol that improves scalability. Jordan was previously on the show to discuss the basics of Ethereum and Bitcoin. This episode covers some advanced topics of Bitcoin, and if you are out of your comfort zone, don’t worry–you aren’t alone.

Stay tuned at the end of the episode for Jeff Meyerson’s tip about assessing cultural fit at a company: brought to you by Indeed Prime.

We have covered the basics of cryptocurrencies in detail, and we have also tackled more complex aspects of them in past episodes. Download the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS and Android to hear all of our old episodes. They are easily organized by category, and as you listen, the SE Daily app gets smarter, and recommends you content based on the episodes you are hearing. If you don’t like this episode, you can easily find something more interesting by using the recommendation system.

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Transcript

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