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Professors From 7 US Colleges, Including MIT and Stanford, Have Teamed Up To Design a Cryptocurrency Capable Of Processing Thousands of Transactions a Second (fortune.com)
Some of the brightest minds in America are pooling their brain power to create a cryptocurrency that's designed to do what Bitcoin has proved incapable of: processing thousands of transactions a second. From a report: Professors from seven U.S. colleges including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley have teamed up to create a digital currency that they hope can achieve speeds Bitcoin users can only dream of without compromising on its core tenant of decentralization. The Unit-e, as the virtual currency is called, is the first initiative of Distributed Technology Research, a non-profit foundation formed by the academics with backing from hedge fund Pantera Capital Management LP to develop decentralized technologies.
Bitcoin is the original cryptocurrency and the first payment network to allow parties to transact directly without needing to trust each another or to rely on a central authority. Yet, while it has built a following among developers, anarchists and speculators, mainstream adoption remains elusive. That's in no small part the product of its design, where inbuilt restrictions have constrained its performance and scalability and, as a result, reduced its usefulness as an everyday unit of payment, DTR said in a research paper. The academics are designing a virtual coin they expect will be able to process transactions faster than even Visa.
Bitcoin is the original cryptocurrency and the first payment network to allow parties to transact directly without needing to trust each another or to rely on a central authority. Yet, while it has built a following among developers, anarchists and speculators, mainstream adoption remains elusive. That's in no small part the product of its design, where inbuilt restrictions have constrained its performance and scalability and, as a result, reduced its usefulness as an everyday unit of payment, DTR said in a research paper. The academics are designing a virtual coin they expect will be able to process transactions faster than even Visa.
Lightning does use the blockchain, but it uses it as a settlement layer which makes a lot more sense than storing everyone's coffee payments on each others computers.
Lightning doesn't route - it bases its functionality on open problems in computing. Spend a hour (if you must watch at 1X) on these two to get a good summary of its problems:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Amazing how people end up recreating the same solutions they were trying to move away from, isn't it?
Ripple has some serious issues, for instance the company and founders still holding over half of the total coins, and they have the ability to freeze the network or an individual account. Ripple isn't fully decentralized; parts of it are firmly under control of Ripple Labs.
Many banks have used Ripple, but in most cases the purpose was to experiment, with Ripple being a convenient mechanism to manage transactions and settlement outside of the banks' own bloated and antiquated systems which lend themselves poorly to experimentation.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...