Author: Patrick Strateman 2015-12-08 20:50:08
Published on: 2015-12-08T20:50:08+00:00
Akiva Lichtner, a payment industry worker with twenty years of development experience, proposed the idea of scaling Bitcoin by running more than one simultaneous chain. Each chain would defeat double spending on only part of the coin. The coin would be partitioned by radix. For example, in order to multiply throughput by a factor of ten, ten parallel chains could run, one working on coins that end in "0", another on coins that end in "1", and so on up to "9". The number of chains could increase automatically over time based on the moving average of transaction volume. Blocks would contain the number of the partition they belong to, and miners would have to round-robin through partitions so that an attacker would not have an unfair advantage working on just one partition. Payment recipients would need to operate a daemon for each chain, thus guaranteeing no scaling advantage. There would not be much impact on miners, but clients would have to send more than one message to spend money. Client messages will need to enumerate coin using some sort of compression to save space. Lichtner believed that there were other issues with this proposal, but he considered payment recipients needing to operate a daemon for each chain to be enough of a showstopper not to continue. He wished continued success to the Bitcoin project and shared a funny anagram for Satoshi Nakamoto: "NSA IS OOOK AT MATH".
Updated on: 2023-06-11T01:54:39.287702+00:00