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Exchanges don't trade on the blockchain, only deposits and withdrawls are on chain. Off chain transactions make up the bulk of transactions as the blockchain can currenly only handle around 7 transactions a second which is about twice as much as it's actually being pushed so there's still room to breath.

The same applies to overstock, coinbase is doing their transaction processing and it's likely most of those are off chain as well as coinbase is a broker and has plenty of coin and dollars in house and is likely where purchasers in the US got their coin anyway as well is also likely being the users online wallet; they settle up daily with an exchange to keep their supply at necessary levels.

Bitcoin isn't ready for mass adoption yet; the infrastructure is still being put into place and the 7 transaction limit has to be removed and exceeded by quite a bit to grow the point of being able to handle large volume kind of stuff. In the meantime, and probably even after, off chain transactions will likely be how most scale is achieved.



I don't think we are anywhere near the blocks being half full, lots are less than 100kB except for Eligius. Is there anywhere displaying this metric?


I wasn't trying to put a hard number on it; I said about half because that's the number I keep hearing repeated when discussions occur.

https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-per-block

Lots of other interesting charts there. In any case, it doesn't really matter as to the main point that exchanges don't do on block trading, the volume would be far too great for what the network can handle.




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