Bitcoin Cash Processed 277 Tx/s, More Than PayPal, Five 32MB Blocks Mined, BU Nodes Crash

Bitcoin Cash has processed 830,000 transactions in five blocks, with each block containing circa 166,300 transactions, translating to a current capacity of 277 transactions per second.

That’s more than PayPal, which handles about 200 transactions a second, with this showcasing the highest level of capacity so far by any decentralized Proof of Work (PoW) based public blockchain.

The network overall handled it well, but about 300 Bitcoin Unlimited (BU) nodes out of circa 720 were unable to keep up.

The problem there was higher levels of memory demand for BU nodes due to a change made recently. Andrew Stone, lead dev of BU, says:

“The recent parallel processing introduced in 1.5.0.0 increases memory use. There’s no way around that — if you are doing N things at once, you need the memory for all N.”

BitcoinABC, the main Bitcoin Cash client, saw no problems with its nodes able to handle the biggest blocks mined yet by any PoW blockchain.

Some suggest these are miner created transactions that are not propagated to other nodes and do not go into the mempool.

Thus they are not real transactions as far as capacity considerations are concerned, with a recent stress test showing the network can handle about 22MB blocks of real continuous usage.

All five blocks have been mined by Craig Wright affiliated BMG Pool. That’s a fairly new entrant to the scene, gaining about 10% of BCH’s hashrate.

Why they decided to create these zombie transactions is not very clear, but a chain-split is now coming in Bitcoin Cash this November 15th due to an apparent disagreement over a highly technical matter called canonical ordering.

Some Bitcoin Unlimited supporters coincidentally appear partial towards Wright’s view on canonical ordering. Making it somewhat ironic that their client came worse off in this display.

The display being of course claimed hidden hash which was showcased yesterday to tell the crypto space that the show has now begun.