If you have read much about blockchain technology, you will be aware that there is an obsession about transaction speed within the community. Indeed, it is possible to conclude that every problem the blockchain and cryptocurrencies are curently experiencing comes down to the issue of speed.
But this obsession is blinding us to the fact that speed isn’t everything and it certainly isn’t going to be a deal-breaker that ends the future of blockchain projects. Certainly most people working in the fintech sector don’t believe it will and for good reason. If you use PayPal as an example, there is an average of 193 transactions per second. Blockchain-based platforms are aiming for one million transactions per second. However, that is a long way off happening. Still, even if PayPal is ‘slow’ compared to what blockchain developers believe they can achieve, nobody thinks the lack of speed is going to be the end of PayPal forever.
Ethereum is the blockchain network most used for transactions and scaling has presented an issue for it. People using the ethereum platform would like to see it scale faster, but there is something else that is more important to them, and that is security. As James Halladay writes at Hackernoon; “Of course, rapidly scaling the Ethereum network would be fantastic — no one’s disputing that — but making it the goal seems misguided.” He calls the obsession a smokescreen and a distraction.
And here is why: do we really need the kind of transaction speed that blockchain enthusiasts have set as the “holy grail”? No, because for fintech platforms security and stability are much more important than being fast. And, the obsession with speed is off-putting to the more conventional financial institutions that might be wooed over to using blockchain solutions if there was more focus on security and stability.
Security is the major advantage that the blockchain has to offer, so if we talk about a ‘Three S’ blockchain, it should be Security –Stability- Speed in that order.