Tangled Up In Blockchains (1)

Bitcoin in particular has propelled blockchain technology into the technical and business media as the next big disruptive technology, or a load of hype, take your pick. Whatever the truth of the matter there's a tsunami of opinionated content out there, although getting to the basic facts can be quite difficult.

This blogchain (ho ho ho) will publish such facts as they become known to the blogger. The blogger being a 'mature' OLTP head more familiar with arcane topics such as 2 phase commit, XA transactions and the Transaction Processing Council benchmarks (www.tpc.org) than with blockchain technology.

To begin with some useful documents have been downloaded from http://scribd.com (a good web site) including "The Bitcoin and the Blockchain" from http://tillitinc.com which though generally supportive of blockchain technology does highlight the key issues it faces.

This one caught my eye:

"the Bitcoin protocol is capable of handling approximately 7 transactions per second"

Wow! It can handle 7 tps whereas the current world record for the TPC-C benchmark (which measures typical commercial/financial transactions) is 8,552,523 tps. Hmmm.

See http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results.asp for details of the TPC-C benchmark results.