Transaction Cost and Information Vulnerability

Learn to contrast the desirable properties of the blockchain with its slow speed, its high transaction cost, and the double-edged sword of transparency.

Blockchain is slow

For a transaction to be valid, it has to be initiated and cryptographically signed. Transactions that change the state of the EVM (transfer of ETH, tokens, or a contract function that changes the value of a state variable) need to be broadcasted to the whole network and only become effective once mined (i.e., added to a block by a miner) and validated by all nodes through a consensus mechanism. This makes processing transactions on the blockchain very slow compared to other forms of distributed computing.

Blockchain is expensive

A transaction object looks like JSON. Here is an example of a transaction:

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