Dear Readers,
The Bitcoin network is a thing of beauty. Within minutes of executing a transaction, you can send your money anywhere in the world without needing anyone’s permission or assistance. There is quite simply no comparison: gold takes days or weeks to transfer, fiat requires the blessing of governments to use, and, as recent experience has taught us, “crypto” assets are liable to be hacked along the way.
But ill-informed comparisons still happen. Critics are unfortunately always looking for ways to sow confusion around Bitcoin.
One of their favorite criticisms centers on Bitcoin’s supposed scalability weakness when compared to payment processing networks. They argue that Bitcoin is inefficient as a means of payment because it only processes about seven transactions per second on its base-layer while networks run by banks and credit card processors are capable of handling hundreds or even thousands of transactions per second.
Such a misguided argument risks missing the forest for the trees…
