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Comment by azylman | Hacker News Reader

I can pretty confidently say that all of Visa+Mastercard is way more than a few thousand transactions per second, I'm familiar with several companies that push hundreds of transactions per second through Visa+Mastercard and there's no way they're a significant portion of their business.

This article claims Mastercard alone is 5k: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-lightning-network-vs-...

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Capacity/peak vs average tps.

Visa says they process "150 million transactions every day in 175 currencies" (see page 3 at https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visan...). That's ~1,800 per second. Mastercard is smaller, so this would be the upper limit for them. Both combined should still fit into "a few thousand transactions per second".

That doc is from 2013, so it's pretty out of date.

True. The latest financial report from Visa [1] says 164.7B transactions in 2021, or ~5,000 per second. This number is 3x larger! Mastercard is slightly smaller, but comparable at 140B [2].

[1] https://annualreport.visa.com/financials/default.aspx

[2] https://s25.q4cdn.com/479285134/files/doc_financials/2022/q2...

Yup, that's a lot closer to the kind of numbers I would have expected. And if you look at peak it's probably at least 10k tps for each of them.

Imagine we can achieve that throughput with a single server without breaking a sweat![1]. The number of economic transactions all humans engage everyday including cash is perhaps 100x of that: so just in order of 500,000 TPS or less that feels quite small to be honest.

[1] Yes these systems are complex and very distributed and have lot of checks and balances and the actual transactions apps and DBs are running on infra in hundreds or thousands of servers in DCs all around the world.

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