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Comment by CoffeeDregs | Hacker News Reader

AFAICT, with current blockchain technology, in order to process PayPal level volumes, every single participant in the network would need to process PayPay level volumes... 1,000 transactions per second is not a problem for a single payments company; it seems like a giant problem for each of the 100,000 nodes on the network also to process 1,000 transactions per second.

Certainly I am missing something obvious?

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This is one of the biggest problems with Blockchains right now. If it cannot be solved then their utility is extremely limited. There are two main approaches that seem likely to work:

- "Layer 2" networks: Most transaction volume happens off-chain. POW blockchain remains as a settlement layer. Quite a few proposed protocols. Lightning network [1] is the most well known. First mainnet lightning transactions were sent in December [2]

- Sharding: Split the blockchain into lots of different blockchains with a subset of miners validating transactions on each sub-chain. Miners are randomly assigned a new sub-chain on a regular basis to stop collusion. Each sub-chain has it's own address space. Sub-chains can communicate using asynchronus message passing. Ethereum has a draft specification [3][4] and is starting to implement some test clients [5].

[1] https://lightning.network/

[2] https://twitter.com/alexbosworth/status/946175898029395968

[3] https://github.com/ethereum/sharding/blob/develop/docs/doc.m...

[4] https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQ

[5] https://blog.ethereum.org/2018/01/02/ethereum-scalability-re...

There won't be 100,000 full nodes; more like 1,000 full nodes and 99,000 light nodes that only verify their own transactions.

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