This article is from:Chain news (ID: chainnewscom)This article is from:
Chain news (ID: chainnewscom)
Chain news (ID: chainnewscom), Author: Nick Tomaino, translation: Perry Wang, forwarded with authorization.
Note: The original author Nick Tomaino is the founder of 1confirmation, an early investment fund for cryptocurrency companies, and the former business development manager of Coinbase.
Let us start with a very cruel reality that must be faced squarely
However, if you want to expand the application of blockchain beyond virtual currency investment, you must have a solution to support its throughput expansion. Critics have been saying that virtual currencies have only speculative value. Indeed, for a new technology that cannot yet support large-scale transactions, the market capitalization of virtual currencies in the hundreds of billions of dollars is really astronomical.
The good news is: there are various proposals to push the blockchain to support mainstream transactions.
scalabilityscalability、decentralizedandSafetydecentralized
Safety
The perfect combination of this triangle relationship.
Vitalik Buterin once expounded on the difficulty of the expansion problem, and it is difficult to get the best of all three. He said that the blockchain system can only solve two of the following three aspects very well.
Vitaliks explanation of the trilemma in the Ethereum documentationDecentralization、There are some new blockchain projects in the market that sacrifice decentralization or security to protect scalability, trying to deploy a blockchain network with higher throughput. Whether this strategy works remains to be seen. But so far, no one has foundandDecentralizationScalability
and
safety
The best of all three strategies to create a fully operational, cryptocurrency-based large-scale blockchain network.
This remains a difficult question: How do you build a blockchain network that satisfies the needs of inspiring large-scale transactions while also supporting those needs?
Currently, there are several possibilities:
For the two most well-known blockchain networks, Bitcoin and Ethereum, the scaling solutions are the Lightning Network for Bitcoin, and Plasma and Casper for Ethereum, respectively.
Among them, Lightning Network and Plasma are two-layer solutions that allow off-chain transactions to be resolved on-chain. Casper uses sharding technology to enhance scalability at the consensus layer.
There are also some other projects that provide second-layer solutions for Ethereum, but they are less well-known, such as TrueBit, Raiden, and Counterfactual. There is also a project that will be built on the P2P network layer of all blockchains, called bloXroute. These efforts are still in their early stages, but the proposals sound promising.
Bitcoin and Ethereum Core Scalability Solutions
The above solutions try to achieve scalability at different sequential layers of the stack, and serve the most widely known and most popular among developers, the Bitcoin and Ethereum public chains. Both the Bitcoin and Ethereum communities have strong beliefs in the cryptocurrency, and these two networks have the strongest need for scaling.
These two networks have also gathered the best talents in blockchain technology. In my opinion, the most likely path forward is multiple solutions that will eventually allow Ethereum and Bitcoin to scale both off-chain and on-chain, so that Ethereum and Bitcoin will eventually become the blockchain core network serving the public .
A new public chain with sufficient scalability was born, attracting users to embrace it
In addition to the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks, people are also focusing on blockchain networks that are more scalable. There are already several new blockchain networks with scalability as the first priority, represented by Bitcoin Cash and Algorand, and DApp platforms represented by Cosmos, Dfinity, and EOS, which have been launched for users and application developers.
image description
A blockchain project that puts scalability first
secondary title
reach a new consensus
Blockchain does not scale
What will the future hold?
I firmly believe that the possibility of transactions without expanding the blockchain network is very small. If this situation really occurs, either the technical solution cannot be found, or the user demand has not increased as much as we imagined.
secondary titleWhat will the future hold?My opinion is that the network effect of Bitcoin and Ethereum and the advantages of gathering technical talents, at the same time, the related technical teams have made a lot of real efforts to find scalability for these two networks, so I am most optimistic about the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks Can support large-scale transactions in the future.
It is also possible, although I think it is much less likely, that a large number of developers and users that can cause a critical mass will switch to a next-generation blockchain network that supports higher transaction capacity, such as Cosmos, Dfinity, EOS, or other projects.
If the bitcoin and ethereum networks break through on scalability issues, were going to see very high demand for transactions
