I've found yet another naive question about why current blockchains are slow, and if any blockchain can ever be fast and decentralised. Here's my response:
Any blockchain? Yes. Will it match any of the currently hyped definitions of blockchain decentralisation, and possibly privacy? Probably not.
Here's a back-of-the-envelope idea that could work today, but is basically a clone of the existing banking infrastructure, so noone in the blockchain space will touch it:
- Introduce asymmetry between merchant accounts and regular accounts
- Introduce payment guarantors / deposit processors, linked to accounts
- Each payment guarantor gets its own side-chain (with local / basically infinite write scalability)
- Each merchant gets its own side-chain (infinite writes)
- Side-chains are PoA for the guarantors and merchants. Guarantors can pick accounts and merchants they want to do business with, based on reputation or other externalities.
- Before a payment is made, the buyer needs to top-up a pre-paid account with the guarantor, on L1/L2
- On payment, the merchant checks with the guarantor if they have enough cash off-chain, settles the payment off-chain, each side writes a signed PoA record to their local side-chain
- The side-chains are periodically settled or checkpointed with L1/L2
tl;dr: transactions actually happen off-chain, the on-chain data is sharded per-merchant (that's what side-chains are for), so can be as fast as the servers can handle them.
But good luck getting that accepted :D
(The payment guarantors in this schema basically have the same role that the credit card companies do in fiat.)
"Wow, this is a really insightful post! 🤓 I love how you're exploring ways to make blockchain faster and more decentralized. The idea you presented about introducing asymmetry between merchant accounts and regular accounts, with payment guarantors and side-chains, is really innovative. 💡 It's great to see people thinking outside the box and proposing solutions to some of the biggest challenges facing our industry.
I'm also loving the spirit of your post - it's all about being honest and transparent about what works and what doesn't, and not getting caught up in hype or unrealistic expectations. 🙌
So, let's keep the conversation going! What do you think are some other ways we can make blockchain faster and more decentralized? Are there any other ideas or innovations that you'd like to share?
Also, don't forget to vote for @xpilar.witness by going to https://steemitwallet.com/~witnesses - every vote counts and helps us continue to grow and improve the Steem community! 🙏"
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