New Attention in Crypto Demands Answers to Scaling
Blockchains are Clogging Up
As crypto currencies attention rises, so does its adoption. The biggest blockchains today, Bitcoin and Ethereum, have not been tailored to handle such high volumes.
Bitcoins average transaction time hovers below 10 minutes, but has spiked to over 200 minutes, 12 times in the last 30 days.
Last week a simple kitten game caused the Ethereum network to charge almost 6 times the normal processing fee. If users didn’t pay this surge charge, then their transactions sat unapproved and waiting for nothing.
Photo - Etherscan
Attention is pushing the limits of blockchain technology. Adoption will crash it. The race is on to build a system that can handle widespread use.
Lineage
Lineage first diverges from an Ethereum look-a-like by separating its payments from smart contracts, and putting them each into their own chain. Payments are the main chain and smart contracts are on individual side chains.
They claim today that:
- Their payment system test net can handle more then 250,000 transactions per second. (Ethereum: 15/s, Visa: 56,000/s). This network can run solely off wallets performing verification (no single purpose miners).
- Side chains, unique to individual smart contracts, comprise 19,000 anchors (on their test net) and use AI to blend together and connect back to the payment chain.
- You can send transactions from offline to offline wallets.
- Lightning Network adaptable.
- Send payments through social media.
- Quantum computing resistant.
While these are all steep tasks at hand, the remainder of this article will cover the payments chain.
LineagePayments
To compare LineagePayment, let’s recap how bitcoin’s blockchain works.
Transactions (or payments), are grouped together into a block. This block gets verified by a node (a computer) and is stored into a chain of blocks on every participating node’s hard drive. Each block is connected to last one, and the next one.
Lineage’s algorithm doesn’t group transaction together, each transaction its own block. This decreases size for each block, but increases the total number stored on the chain.
Thus changing the game in two main aspects.
- With decreased block size comes decreased time to validate and computational power required.
- With increased number of blocks, comes an increased need for nodes.
In Lineage, each online wallet will act as a node, validating transactions.
This is possible because the payments chain will automatically fork when it reaches 25mb, into a new chain exactly where the old one left off. Each node will only have to store the new, much smaller chain.
By drastically decreasing the size of the chain, and the size of the blocks, personal laptops and mobile phones are able to operate as full nodes.
Summed up in my words, LineagePayments is a recycling chain made of tiny sized blocks, run entirely by those who use it.
In Derek Liu's words, CEO of Lineage, "Instead of a box full of things in a warehouse, it's a warehouse full of things without a box. With each warehouse being cleared instantly after it reaches a capacity."
While the entire crypto community seeks for new ways to scale, I think this sounds like a breath of fresh air. What do you think?
The payment chain is only the first aspect of Lineage, future articles will dive into the sidechain, offline transactions, AI, social pay, and more.
Lineage.network
Whitepaper