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Estimating Lightning Network saves 250 transactions per block
4 sats \ 2 comments \ @nout 25 Aug 2021 bitcoin
Different wallets are making hundreds of thousands of transactions per month. It sounds like a fair estimate that there are at least 1 million LN transactions per month, maybe up to couple million. (Breez, WoS homepage )
So this means "at least" ~250 transactions every 10 minutes.
It would be great to get numbers from Sphinx chat, because my guess is that Sphinx is the heaviest LN user. Anyone has contact on Paul Itoi and can trick him into hinting the numbers? :)
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2 sats \ 1 reply \ @abetusk 25 Aug 2021
So, considering there are on average 3 BTC transactions per second on chain (src), this means that the lightning network is adding about 0.42 transactions per second (250 (off-chain updates / BTC block update) / (60 (s/min) * 10 (min/BTC block update)).
That may not seem much but that's already a %14 increase in transaction throughput and I imagine it's only just starting.
For some context:
Average BTC transactions per second3src
Average / Median BTC transaction amount$197k / $760src
Average / Median Volume BTC per second$591k/s / $2.28k/s($197k*3(tx/s)) / ($760*3(tx/s))
Average Visa transactions per second1700src
Average Visa transaction amount$80src
Average Volume Visa per second$136k/s($80 * 1700 (tx/s))
I find it pretty surprising that there are only around 12k bitcoin nodes (src) but around 25k lightning nodes (src). This means that most people use some off-site bitcoin node to have their lightning node talk to it?
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2 sats \ 0 replies \ @nout OP 26 Aug 2021
I think there is some chance that there are actually 1000 LN transactions every 10 minutes, since we don't really have numbers on the different gaming platforms and Sphinx and Strike, etc. So that would be 1.6tx/s, or 50% increase in throughput.
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