5.5 million people. That’s almost 0.5% of all electricity consumption

worldwide, and a 10 times jump from just five years ago”.

Such concerns has led the Tesla founder, Elon Musk to not accept

any payment in terms of Bitcoin for any business transactions in the

organization. Apart from many regulations and security concerns,

Bitcoin has serious technical limitations such as slow execution time

and high transaction fees. Transactions in the Bitcoin network take

10 minutes to get committed and the average transaction fee is

almost $23 today. Whosoever has worked in Bitcoin would be very

well aware of its throughput which is about 24 transactions per

second or TPS which is too slow to be considered for payments in

the mainstream.

Obviously, such limitations would be a road-blocker for a Bitcoin or a

similar Blockchain network to get into the mainstream, as they

cannot compete with the legacy of the centralized systems such as

VISA that runs almost at 24,000 TPS. Hence, it’s only obvious that

the next generation of Blockchains have to overcome such

limitations by improving their capabilities with better architecture.

1.12 Areas of research and improvement

The following are some of the areas where most of the Blockchain

protocols have worked to come up with a better speed for execution

with a lower cost:

Consensus models

Scalability,

Performance

(i.e.,

faster

finality

and

high

transactions per second or TPS)

Transaction fees

L2 Solutions

1.12.1 Consensus Model

The primary reason for the Bitcoin’s poor performance is because of

its consensus model. The PoW consensus model works on a voting

system that needs to wait to gather 51% consensus from the nodes