Bitcoin vs Solana

Bitcoin is the first decentralized blockchain, secured by proof‑of‑work where miners expend SHA‑256 hash power to find valid blocks every ~10 minutes. The supply is capped at 21 million coins, with inflation halving roughly every four years—the most recent halving occurred on 20 April 2024. Upgrades like SegWit and Taproot have enabled second‑layer protocols such as the Lightning Network and emerging covenants via OP_CTV debates.

Solana combines Proof‑of‑History, Turbine block propagation and Gulf Stream forwarding to achieve throughput exceeding 50 000 TPS with 400 ms block times. The 2024 Firedancer client written in C++ reduced validator CPU requirements and added parallel pipeline execution. Solana Pay and the Saga phone SDK illustrate the project’s push toward consumer‑grade web3 applications.