Bitcoin has surpassed PayPal

This year, Bitcoin has surpassed PayPal in the value of processed transactions amounting to more than $1.3 trillion.

For many, Bitcoin's success is determined by its throughput or scalability. Now, the biggest criticism of the granddaddy of all cryptocurrencies is that on its network you can only make a few transactions per second, while payment giants Visa or PayPal can provide tens of thousands.

According to Yassin Elmanjr, a cryptanalyst in New York, Bitcoin this year overtook PayPal in transaction value with a figure of $1.3 trillion.

Statistics try to compare the transaction volume of Bitcoin with Visa, MasterCard or PayPal. The analyst compared the actual cost of the operations performed. In a chart he published on Twitter, the actual dollar value of transactions exceeds the financial indicators of the giants PayPal and Discover and approaches the indicators of Visa. 

Although Bitcoin has a theoretical chance of overtaking Visa, this may not happen soon. While Visa processes $8.9 trillion in credit card transactions, Bitcoin still has a long way to go to catch up with the US payments giant in terms of transaction value. Since 2015, the most popular cryptocurrency by market capitalization has had a seemingly very rapid growth rate, with an eightfold increase in transaction value in 2017. If the growth trend continues at 80.17 percent per year (as it did from 2013 to 2018), then Bitcoin will overtake Visa in 2022 and theoretically handle more than $13 trillion in payment volume.

Contrary to the complex payment market protocols of recent years, the development of Bitcoin appears to have sparked yet another debate about the purpose of creating a cryptocurrency.

Although many believe that BTC should at least increase transaction throughput, others argue that Bitcoin was created only for transactions with high costs, which are paid for their anonymity. The latter camp does not care about long confirmation times and high commission fees. 

Elmanjr himself believes that BTC should not strive to increase throughput and try to reach the level of leaders in payment systems. These are questions of technology or Bitcoin infrastructure.. Scalability solutions such as Lightning Network, SegWit are currently being actively developed.