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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.
"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.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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...