Fundamental challenges with public blockchains & Thinkium solutions
There’s no question that blockchain technology has enormous potential.
Decentralized exchanges, prediction markets, and asset management platforms are just a few of the exciting applications being explored by blockchain developers.
Exciting enough, in fact, to raise over billions in ICOs and drive massive price rallies throughout 2017. The hype is real.
However, there’s a flipside to this story that isn’t getting enough attention: blockchains have several major technical barriers that make them impractical for mainstream use today.
I believe that we will get there, but we need to be realistic as developers and investors. And the reality is that it could be many years before trustless systems are ready for mainstream use at scale.
Some of these technical barriers include:
Limited scalability
Limited privacy
Lack of formal contract verification
Storage constraints
Unsustainable consensus mechanisms
Lack of governance and standards
Inadequate tooling
Quantum computing threat
… and more.
In this post, I’ll walk through these technical barriers and share examples of solutions for overcoming them.
As developers, I believe it’s critical that we shift some of our focus away from shiny new ICOs to the real technological challenges standing in our way.
NOTE: There’s no way I can cover every problem and every solution out there, but I covered the ones I’m most familiar with. Please refrain from too harshly criticizing me for not including something. I’d love for you to post anything I missed in the comments and I’ll add it if I see fit :) … And if I’ve made any mistakes or wrong assertions, please let me know!
Limited scalability
Currently, all public blockchain consensus protocols have a challenging limitation: every fully participating node in the network must process every transaction.
Why? Well, recall that blockchains are fundamentally “decentralized” — which means that no central party is responsible for securing and maintaining the system. Instead, every single node on the network is responsible for securing the system by processing every transaction and maintaining a copy of the entire state.
While a decentralization consensus mechanism offers us the core benefits of blockchain that we all care about — security guarantees, political neutrality, censorship resistance, etc. — it comes at the cost of scalability, since decentralization by definition limits the number of transactions the blockchain can process to the limitations of a single fully participating node in the network.
Two practical implications here:
Low throughput: Blockchains can only process a limited number of transactions
Slow transaction times: The time required to process a block of transactions is slow. For example, Bitcoin block times are 10 minutes, while Ethereum block times are around 14 seconds. These times are even longer during peak moments. Compare that to the nearly instantaneous confirmations you get when using services like Square or Visa.
As a result, public blockchains are forced to make a tradeoff between low transaction throughput and high degree of centralization.
In other words, as the size of the blockchain grows, the requirements for storage, bandwidth, and compute power required by fully participating nodes in the network also increase. At some point, it becomes unwieldy enough that it’s only feasible for the few nodes that can afford the resources to process blocks — leading to the risk of centralization.
At that point, we’ve made a full 360-degree turn and gotten back to a centralized system that requires trust in a few big players, whereas what we want is a system that handles thousands of transactions per second with the same levels of decentralization that cryptocurrency originally promised to offer.
Thinkium Solution
Thinkium uses a multi-chain layered multi-level system architecture, PoS-based random election, TBFT, cross-chain, intra-chain sharding, and multi-chain parallel computing to fundamentally solve the “impossible triangle” problem of the blockchain.
Infinite and scalable performance: Under the condition of ensuring decentralization and consistency, as the number of nodes and chains increases, the performance of the Thinkium system can be infinitely extended, supporting use case scenarios that require a large number of users and application operations.
Completely decentralized: Allow consensus nodes to join the Thinkium network without permission, and there are no super nodes.
Data consistency: Under the condition that malicious nodes are allowed, Thinkium nodes can reach a consensus result.
Fusion of Public and Consortium Chain
With the underlying technology of the Thinkium blockchain, enterprises can split their business data and logic according to their requirements. They can keep confidential parts into a trusted consortium chain and open another part of the business that requires sharing to the public chain. Thinkium supports both business confidentiality and value circulation. Business can easily adjust the split between the public chain and the consortium chain when needed.
Part 2 to follow…
