1/ The only way to scale Proof of Work is to scale block production. This is why @kadena_io has emphasized how many blocks the network has mined. Let's examine the technical details of why this is the case...
2/ There's a limit to how many transactions you can fit into a block and there's also a limit to how low you can make the block time. Improvements in the network efficiency can help you do more within these limits, but at the end of the day there's only so much you can do.
3/ First let's look at the limit on the number of transactions in a block. This is driven by two factors: space and time. Every transaction uses some space because you have to store at least the sender, receiver, and amount
4/ Smart contract blockchains also have an additional time component because transactions are computer programs and it takes time for the system to run those transactions. The more (and bigger) transactions you put in a block, the longer it takes to process the block.
5/ The second limiting factor is how fast you can make the block time. The network is trying to establish worldwide consensus about the state of the blockchain. This means that each block has to be sent all over the world. The speed of light limits how fast this can be done.
6/ The speed of light is ~300,000 km / s. The earth is ~40,000 km in circumference, which means it's ~20,000 km to get to the other side of the world. 20,000 km / 300,000 km / s = 0.067 seconds.
7/ There are all kinds of other things that introduce overhead into the system, but if we assume that a block can be sent instantaneously no matter how big it is, then it's still going to take 0.067 seconds to get to the other side of the world.
8/ This means we definitely can't have a block time shorter than ~0.07 seconds. Again, keep in mind this is not an accurate estimate, it's an absurdly low lower bound that assumes zero overhead in the rest of the network which is obviously not realistic.
9/ To recap, we have seen that you can only fit so many transactions into a block and there's a limit to how low you can make the block time. Therefore, the only way to scale blockchains is to produce more blocks in parallel...i.e. use multiple chains like @kadena_io is doing.
10/ Let's look at some actual numbers. Right now explorer.chainweb.com shows us that @kadena_io's current block height is 1464862. The network was using 10 chains from genesis until block height 852054 when we scaled the network up to 20 chains.
11/ So the total number of blocks produced by the @kadena_io network is 852054 * 10 + (1464862 - 852054) * 20 = ~20.7 million blocks total in less than a year and a half. For comparison, Bitcoin has produced 700K blocks in 12 years and Ethereum has produced 12M blocks in 6 years
12/ And of course as I've mentioned before the best part of this is that @kadena_io is not limited to the current block production rate. It can scale to dramatically larger numbers of chains as needed. The best is yet to come!
https://twitter.com/KadenaDirEng/status/1361916804025757696
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
