Speed isn't everything—that's the takeaway from recent technical discussions around high-performance blockchain networks. Here's the math: push a network to ~200k TPS and suddenly you're looking at massive bandwidth demands for authentication. Shift to post-quantum resistant signatures and you're staring at 0.5-1.5GB/s just handling the crypto layer. That's not sustainable. Latency tanks. Markets suffer when confirmation times blow out.

The real challenge isn't bragging about peak throughput numbers. It's making architectural choices that don't sacrifice settlement finality for raw speed. Modern Layer 1s have to pick their battles: optimize for signature verification, or keep transaction latency tight? Both simultaneously? That's the hard problem nobody talks about. Some networks are being honest about this tradeoff instead of pretending breakthrough cryptography solves everything.