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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.
"non-profit foundation formed by the academics with backing from hedge fund Pantera Capital Management LP"
Right. Non-profit.
Don't get me wrong.... its a fun experiment to try and come up with new experimental types of blockchains and transactional systems.
But Bitcoin already has a pragmatic solution called the Lightning Network that uses second-layer networks allowing wallets to safely transact off the chain, resulting in extremely high scalability and low fees --- as a result it is not even limited to "Thousands of transactions per second".... indeed to be a competitor in payment processing, Millions of Transactions per Second may be required ---
so when you think of scaling; just making a native blockchain capable of thousands of TPS sounds impressive at first, at first, But its really not much in the grand scheme of things --- when you're talking about transitioning from experiment to real-world use.
Ultimately, layering additional peer-to-peer networks with certain safeguards and no lower bound that says a transaction takes at least X minutes, is a smart approach.
Would I be able to pay with Unit-e to purchase Unity-engine based games on my Unity desktop?
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
Ripple is already the most-used cryptocurrency for cross-border payments (DAG-based) with years of R&D and partnerships with major banks and corporations around the world.
It'll be a steep hill to climb to get something out of the Ivory Tower to compete. This would have been cutting edge six years ago, though.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I'm selling ALL my bitcoin, gold bullion and Infowars.com shares to buy in now, and anyone who isn't a libtard should do the same. This is a guaranteed investment, backed by MIT, Slashdot and the full force of the US military.
Visa alone is capable of processing 56,000 transactions per second.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"without compromising on its core tenant of decentralization"
Shouldn't that be "tenet" or is my English not as good as I think it is?
When I read the summary I wondered whether the researchers involved had a track record of interesting work in this area, or in cryptography more generally. It took some searching but I found the list of names here: https://dtr.org/research/#rese....
FWIW, neither I nor my academic cryptographer friends immediately recognized any of these people. I do see that Andrew Miller is on the ZCash board, which gives him some credibility in my book.
That I don't recognize them doesn't mean that much, but I'd be more inclined to follow this work closely if it were done by people with a solid track record in the space. Time will tell.
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You've re-invented sidechains.
it sounds like it's just something a bunch of guys want to do. They're smart guys, so maybe they'll do it, but they need to solve not just speed but power usage. Water & Electricity are both heavily subsidized. When you start using a ton of power and produce basically nothing for the local communities they're gonna notice. Bitcoin miners were starting get draw flack until the crash happened and slowed everything down.
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Just what we needed. Now all of Earth's problems are solved.
He's "blathering" about the obvious fact the using Lightning is no different than trading in ETH for SomeShitCoin on Ethereum.
It's a fucking scam riding on top of Bitcoin, with the full backing and support of "trust us". You give them your Bitcoin, and you get a credit in Lightning. You have to fully trust those clowns and all the clowns using Lightning, and trust that you'll get your BTC back before Lightning goes tits up. That's all ON TOP of having to trust BTC. (Though the simple fact is BTC is essentially unassailable.)
The Red Belly blockchain is reported to handle 600,000 transaction per second. It was developed at the University of Sydney's school of information technologies.
The Constitution of the United States is unique in that it restricts government, not The People.