Go big or go home

CoinGeek.com announces funding of up to 3.6 million Euro to support Terab, an open source initiative that will solve a key technical issue to enable the Bitcoin Cash chain to massively scale to terabyte (1 million megabyte) size blocks and 7 million transactions per second. The Terab project will be managed by Lokad, the French quantitative supply chain technology provider, and will receive technical support from nChain, the blockchain research & development specialist.

One of the major criticisms of Segwit Bitcoin is the apparent inability to scale to the level of transactions that payment networks such as Visa and Mastercard can provide. For cryptocurrencies to be competitive in the global payments space, high volume transaction scaling is vital but, not, as many have suggested, impossible and Bitcoin Cash is now firmly on that road.

The legacy Segwit Bitcoin has shackled its own progress by refusing to allow the current block size cap (1MB) that only allows for 3-4 transactions per second to be lifted and thus has fated the coin to the dustbin of cryptocurrency history. But last October, the BCH community welcomed news that a 1 gigabyte (GB) block was successfully mined and propagated through the Gigablock Testnet Initiative, the collaboration between Bitcoin Unlimited and nChain.

Envisioning an even bigger future, Lokad founder, Joannes Vermorel has recently advocated that terabyte-size blocks are viable – but only on the BCH chain. A single terabyte block (added every 10 minutes) can contain about 4 billion Bitcoin transactions, and provide capacity of 7 million transactions per second. The scale of a network with 1 TB blocks would be immense, and enable BCH to power not just monetary transactions but machine-to-machine data transactions of many types.

With such a massively scaled BCH network, one technical issue that must be solved is how to optimize the unspent transaction output (UTXO) database maintained by nodes to prevent double-spending of Bitcoins. Assessing the correct amount of Bitcoins associated with each output is an essential step in the validation of a new block. With the transaction volume possible in 1TB blocks, the UTXO database would also grow immensely.

Lokad now has the funding for Terab, an open source initiative to develop solutions to optimize performance of the UTXO database and prepare for a future BCH network with 1 TB blocks. The Terab project’s goal is to deliver a standardized microservice API and high performance single node, multi-node and distributed software implementations that are progressively capable of supporting the throughput required for 1 GB and then 10 GB blocks. These will pave the way for similar implementations that can eventually support TB size blocks. Lokad will hire and manage a project team to develop the Terab software. The Terab software will be made available for usage under an open source license, but only for usage on the BCH chain.

Antiguan citizen and owner of CoinGeek.com, Calvin Ayre, has pledged up to 3.6 million Euro worth of funding to Lokad for the Terab project, in order to make massive BCH scalability a reality.

Coupled with CoinGeek’s financial investment, nChain will provide technical advice, support from its research and development team members, and relevant intellectual property licenses for use in the Terab project. nChain’s Chief Scientist Craig Wright will work closely with Lokad on this initiative.

Lokad CEO, Joannes Vermorel, commented: “To have this level of support means we can start building progressive scalability for BCH immediately which will be transformative for BCH as the only genuine peer-to-peer currency.”

nChain Group CEO, Jimmy Nguyen, added: “Terab is exactly the type of collaboration that nChain supports – projects that help fulfill the Satoshi Nakamoto white paper’s vision of a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Bitcoin Cash best represents that vision, and we are pleased to partner with Lokad to solve a key technical need for a massively scaled BCH network. The Terab project also exemplifies how microservices architecture is needed for BCH applications to reach enterprise-level usage.”

CoinGeek.com owner, Calvin Ayre, continued: “The criticisms of cryptocurrencies are very useful as they help us see what hurdles we have to take down in order to achieve low-fee micro-transactions. They are a few more which we will be addressing in due course but rest assured we will prove that BCH is the one true chain.”
In addition to Terab, CoinGeek.com intends to support more initiatives that will enable global growth and adoption of Bitcoin Cash. If you are a developer or technology venture that needs funding to develop projects or applications for the Bitcoin Cash chain, send your pitch via http://coingeek.com/contact.

NOTE: TOKENS IN THE SEGWIT CHAIN ARE REFERRED TO AS SEGWIT1X (BTC) AND SEGWIT GOLD (SWG) AND ARE NO LONGER BITCOIN. BITCOIN CASH (BCH) IS THE ONLY TRUE BITCOIN AS INTENDED BY THE ORIGINAL SATOSHI WHITE PAPER. BITCOIN BCH IS THE ONLY PUBLIC BLOCK CHAIN THAT OFFERS SAFE AND CHEAP MICROTRANSACTIONS.