The voting on ethereum analysis by Dominik Schiener calculated that it would take 40 days to hold the UK general elections on the ethereum blockchain due to the transaction and gas limits.
I redid his math with some more current figures, here is what I calculated:
- the gas limit is 3,141,592 (pi million)
- transaction costs 21,000 gas (let's assume nothing else is attached)
- that's 149.5996 transactions per block
- with a blocktime of around 17.43 seconds
- that's 4956.971 blocks per day
The result is the network allows for this use cas only 741560.9 votes (transactions) per day. But what if we require a volume of let's say 10x or 100x the transaction rate? How does the ethereum network scale? How fast can gas limits be adjusted? How many transactions can the network handle?