Instead, much of the work being done to resolve scalability issues today has been centered on off-chain solutions - platforms that allow large batches of transactions to occur within a closed-loop system and then use the blockchain to "close out" these batches as one single transaction. There are, however, solutions being developed that do not require consensus approval, simply because they don't seek to alter any existing blockchain. In the case of Segwit 2x, initial support for the hardfork slowly eroded over time as community members made the determination that the hardfork going to simply be a Band-Aid on a more serious problem.
#Crypto compare currency upgrade#
As a hardfork is essentially a new version of a blockchain's programming, a sufficient number of nodes within the blockchains consensus network need to agree to upgrade to the specific version. The failure of Segwit 2x in late 2017 can, once again, be attributed to both the intrinsic strength and flaw of blockchain technology - decentralization. Options like Bitcoin's Segwit 2x hardfork, which would have doubled the size of each block in the database, also ultimately never came to pass. Some attempts at solutions have been made, but many have suffered from a lack of adoption by the widespread community or they have been too incremental to offer much in the way of relief. The greatest minds of the blockchain community have been hard at work to find answers to the problem of scalability. Users caught up in buying, selling, trading, and breeding these little cryptographic pet rocks were using Ethereum resources to do so, causing slowdowns for those who wanted to use the blockchain for other transactions. This means that, in the end, no contemporary blockchain is safe from scalability worries, as the more popular a blockchain gets the more likely demand will outstrip computing power.Įthereum, for example, perhaps the second most well-known blockchain, encountered similar slowdowns in late 2017 thanks to the sudden craze for CryptoKitties, monetized digital collectibles that grew wildly popular over the course of little over a month. They all work on the same distributed consensus mechanism, which means that they all suffer from the same flaw of bottlenecking if they become too popular. While we use Bitcoin as an example, the scalability problem is an inherent one in practically every blockchain currently in use. This, too, was a result of the inability of Bitcoin to keep up with the number of transactions on its blockchain. At the same time, the fee associated with each transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain, which had been minuscule up until this point, began to swell to accommodate the new demand. Transaction volume skyrocketed, causing major transaction backlogs of hours or even days, a frustrating delay when users expect transactions to last a few seconds or minutes at most. This turned out to be too much of a good thing. However, once the cryptocurrency reached a new zenith of popularity in late 2017 - something that led to a major price bubble - the number of individuals interested in Bitcoin increased exponentially. This was, in fact, quite clearly the case during the majority of Bitcoin's lifetime. The Real-World ProblemĮven with the inherent bottleneck caused by seeking consensus across an entire decentralized network, 7 transactions a second sounds like it would be sufficient for most people's needs. That means that blockchains are effectively capped at a relatively low number of transactions they can handle per second - despite the power of Bitcoin, for example, can easily achieve 4,000 transactions per second if it was run on a single computer, the need to have every node on the network reach consensus throttles that to a measly 7 transactions per second. The consensus-based nature of most blockchains means that every node maintaining the blockchain database has to verify every transaction on its ledger.
However, the unfortunate side effect is that the speed of these networks, when it comes to processing transactions, is often diminished. These properties are advantageous when it comes to ensuring that a financial network is highly resistant to tampering it's something that each and every simple user guide for cryptocurrency will undoubtedly point out. Yet it's the economies of scale - the number of people using these systems - that blockchains are still struggling to solve.Ĭryptocurrency innovators conceptualized the blockchain around the idea of decentralization - distributed computing that provided high levels of security and redundancy through cryptographic means. Cryptocurrencies based on blockchains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and others have taken the world by storm, showing how decentralized computing platforms can be used to create and maintain whole digital economies.
0 kommentar(er)
