Speed

Centralized systems and decentralized systems tend to be faster or slower at dealing with certain types of events. Blockchains are decentralized systems of record keeping. One way to think about a basic blockchain such as bitcoin is that it is an append-only database. Bitcoin can handle approximately seven transactions a second. By comparison, Visa and MasterCard are distributed (but not decentralized) transaction-handling systems that can handle more than 40,000 transactions a second. Blockchain systems continue to increase in speed but typically at with the trade-off of some amount of centralization or restrictions on access. Some PoS systems such as Tendermint or Waves have a theoretical throughput of over 1,000 tx/second but are still far from the peak capacity of their traditional counterparts.