Author: Andrew 2015-12-09 22:35:07
Published on: 2015-12-09T22:35:07+00:00
Akiva Lichtner, who has twenty years of experience in development and works in the payment industry, is seeking expert feedback on his idea for scaling Bitcoin. He proposes to run more than one simultaneous chain, with each chain defeating double spending on only part of the coin. The coin would be partitioned by radix, for instance, ten parallel chains could work on coins that end in 0 through 9. The number of chains could automatically increase over time based on transaction volume. Akiva does not believe there will be much impact on miners, but clients will have to send more than one message to spend money. The client messages will need to enumerate coins using compression to save space. Loi Luu, one of the authors of the SCP protocol, responded to Akiva's proposal, questioning the solution's ability to shard efficiently without degrading any security guarantees. Luu points out that simply splitting coins or transactions into several partitions will not work. Luu sees a problem with other proposals, and probably Akiva's as well, where the amount of data that needs to be broadcast immediately to the network increases linearly with the number of transactions that the network can process. Thus, sharding does not bring any advantage other than simply using other techniques to publish more blocks in one epoch (like Bitcoin-NG, Ghost). The whole point of using sharding/partitioning is to localize the bandwidth used and only broadcast minimal data to the network. Luu believes that their SCP protocol is able to localize the bandwidth used and provides potential scalability while requiring recipients to verify whether a transaction is a double spend, which they see as a reasonable tradeoff. Akiva responds to Luu's comments, thanking him for his feedback and stating that he was not quite convinced with segregated witness, as it might mess up some things, but he will take a closer look.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T01:55:22.974241+00:00