SCALABILITY

Scalability is the property of a blockchain that determine the efficiency and speed of the blochchain. Different blockchains vary in this aspect.

We have talked about how the block chain technology will be the future of trading, but the limiting factor is going to be scalability, for instance, the bitcoin coin blockchain can only perform 4.6 or approximately 5 transactions per second, this is way too small for bitcoin ; the first and most trusted blockchain, to be adopted globally.

Centalized systems are much faster , take Visa for example, can process 1700 transacions per second (TPS), although there are some blockcahins that can operate at such speed; we will talk about that as we progress.

There are three broad concepts, Decentralization, Speed and Security. And a block chain system can only conform to two of them at the same time, that is, if a block chain is Secured, and Decentralized, it is going to have issues with speed ( like in bitcoin ) and if the system is fast and secured, then it is going to have issues with decentralization(like Ripple) , so the Issue of Speed is more of a feature than a defect and as such blockchains may never really be able to overdome it , but of course there will be improvements albeit at a cost.

THE CAUSE OF THE BLOCKCHAIN SCALABILITY ISSUE

1)CONSENSUS: Blochchains are decentralized systems and as such does not store information or trade data in a single server, but the trade data or ledger is distributed across nodes in the system or network, thereby making it almost impregnable by hackers and every node is involved In the validation of transactions on the system to avoid double spending and fraud. At the heart of the blochchain tevhnology lies something known as CONCENSUS PROTOCOL.

The consensus protocol of a block chain is the kind of processes that is taken for a transaction to be accepted by the network. So there is a kind of interaction between nodes or peers in a network and then sometimes a voting is done as in the Stellar Consensus Protocol(SCP); stellar can perform up to 1000 TPS. A consensus protocol helps to avoid fradulent ( byzantine ) nodes from carrying out fraudulent activities and it does this without a central system, so It is the consensus protocol itself that is part of the scalability problems of the blockchain technology

1. BLOCKS/ NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS : As the number of participants increase, so does the number of transactions and a lot of strain is put on the system and this in turn makes it more difficult in validating transactions because more nodes will be iinvolved in the decision making process All these series of events makes it difficult for blockchain technology to be used primetime.

On performing transactions on the tron and Binance smartchain, I was observed that the time taken for validation, was almost the same ; maybe do to some factors like network coverage, but the validation took about 4 minutes .

HOW TO IMPROVE SCALABILITY

There has been different methods employed to try to tackle the scalability issue eventhough these in themselves create some more problems, like the shift from proof of work to proof of stake, and expanding the blocksize. Bellow are some blockchains and ways I think can make them more scalable.

1)Bitcoin Blockcain: The bitcoin block chain; the pioneer of the blockchain technology, performs some 3-7 TPS and takes about 10 minutes for a trade to be validated .

An attempt to improve the scalability led to de development of bitcoin cash( of which the block size was increased from 1mb to 32mb but the issue with this is that it because more expensive to manage and so only the wealthy can operate in the blockhain and this does a great deal of harm to the decentralization concept we want to improve.

So to improve this blockchain, there should be a way that some aspects of the validation process is done off chain and the actuall validation process only, should be done on the boockchain.

1. Tron Blockchain : The tron blockchain, just like the bitcoin block chain can only perform a few transactions per second ( about 5TPS) . The tron blochchain can also be greatly improved by adopting an off- chain solution.

This will be very efficient with tron, because of its also high number of participants on the blockchain network and this can clog the system but will some part of the validation proces done offline, a more scalable blockchain can be achieved.

1. Binance Smart Chain: This is an offshot of the finance chain, and it was created to be a a decentralized blockchain. The scalability .This blockchain can be made faster if the use of a delegated proof of stake consensus protocol ; which is similar to the PoSA already in use .

The delegated proof of stake was developed by Software engineer, Daniel Larimer , This protocol helps to reduce the energy consumption and also very scalable compared to proof of work(PoW) and proof of stake(PoS).

@alphafx