Speed, give me what I need

I keep seeing lots and lots of articles comparing the speed (in transactions per second) between the traditional financial system (but mostly card and mostly Visa) with one or the other of the cryptocurrencies. A recent infographic is the one here, where Visa is listed with 24kTPS vs Ripple’s 1.5kTPS and Ethereum’s 20TPS and Bitcoin’s 7TPS.

But comparing the speed of card schemes transactions with those of cyptocurrencies is ‘apples to oranges’ comparison because

a. looking at the system as a whole (money-banks-cards), Visa is a Layer 2 scheme, it ‘runs’ on a layer provided by the Fed, ECB, other central banks and governments. (from this point of view maybe we should compare with the speed of Lightning Network :-))

b. while in most (all?) cryptocurrencies the value transfer (i.e. the settlement) happens with the transaction itself, in Visa’s case this actual value transfer happens in what ? 3 days if you’re lucky? 30 days? Why don’t we factor these additional settlement days into equation?

c. for a card transaction, the bulk of the work is not done by Visa itself, but by the bank issuing each card and the acquiring bank/processor. Visa merely passes the authorization request from the acquirer to the issuer, keeping track of the request and response (so it can latter settle what needs to be settled). Not the case with cryptos — everything happens in the open where everyone can see it (sometimes — like in ETH’s case- the same computation happens on multiple computers in parallel — thus somehow verifying that everyone’s on the same page)

d. almost irrespective of the number of nodes in the network all the cryptos will be able to maintain the same throughput (e.g. 7TPS in Bitcoin’s case), but in Visa’s case if 1/3 of their network goes down (not to mention their hub in NJ — i think that’s where it’s located) they will probably go to 0 TPS.

It’s also worth mentioning that Visa is not the biggest money transfer system in terms of throughput. Alipay far exceeds it on Single’s Day — with a factor of about 10

That’s the resilience of the distributed networks. As for the difference in speed in various cryptocurrencies, I won’t go in the war between various ‘factions’ on the crypto-front. One single comment specific to the infographic linked in the first paragraph. Ripple/XRP might be doing 1.5k TPS, but it’s because is closer to Visa in some respects than to a cryptocurrency. In a fairly distributed network a lot of the slowdown is because of the need for consensus, the more centralised a network is, the easier (and faster) consensus is achieved.