So I'm relatively new to the Steem ecosystem and spent the last couple weeks figuring out the ins and outs of it to have a well informed opinion it. I'm a software developer and I got into crypto because of the tech and not because of trading and lambo memes. After learning about Bitcoin and its limitations I started looking around in the altcoin space to find out how they are dealing with scaling, avoiding centralization and the energy waste caused by mining. The first thing I found was Ethereum which brings flexible blocksizes and faster block time to the table (and also smart contracts which I'm planning to write about).
As of writing this Ethereum's most tx/day is 1,345,385 which is more than triple the size of Bitcoin's 428,927. But there's a problem: while Ethereum can deliver a large number of transactions per day it still uses Proof of Work as its consensus algorithm (which causes the wasted electricity) and have a quite pricey transaction fee. According to ETH Gas Station the current SafeLow is 23 gwei (~ $0.47) and predicts a 52 minute confirmation time. That means on average you have to wait for almost an hour for a transaction you paid half a dollar fee for.
This means it is far from ideal and I continued my search. That's how I stumbled upon Steem. It uses Proof of Stake instead of Proof of Work which you can read about in this comparison to PoW and has a ~ 3-5 second transaction time. And the cost of that is nothing. That's right, transactions on the steem blockchain is completely free. If you want to try it yourself just leave a comment under this article or upvote it and count the number of seconds and money it took.
But how is commenting and upvoting related to any of this, you might ask. This is the best part and the main reason I find Steem fascinating. Because every article, comment and vote is a transaction on the blockchain. That's right, the article you are reading right now is sitting on the blockchain. Nobody can delete it or take it down (well that's not entirely true because you could manipulate the blockchain if you had 51% of all STEEM which is about $800 million but still then it's highly impractical) and anyone running a full node can access it.
And how many transactions steem can handle a day? According to blocktivity.info 1,388,172 which is more than any other cryptocurrency right now. And an other interesting metric to look at is the Capacity Utilization Index (CUI):
It represents the actual blockchain usage and the remaining available capacity. Have a look at how many Tx have been recorded during a day and see how much more capacity the blockchain has left.
Steem is at 0.11% and Ethereum/Bitcoin is at 100%. I let you draw a conclusion from this one yourself!
This is my fist post on steemit and I'm planning on posting regularly here instead of medium.com so follow me if you're interested and leave a comment to let me know your opinion about the topic. Thanks!