DigiByte scaling: On-chain is do-able!
As happens, people were talking smack on Twitter and proving how little they know. Unfortunately I didn’t have anything on-hand immediately to show scaling can work, so, I’ve put this together.
You see, off-chain second-layer platforms like Lightning Network are a terrible, terrible idea. What’s the point of using a blockchain if the transactions aren’t on-chain? It’s exactly the same as using a credit card at that point, with an intermediary that must be trusted. It goes against the whole idea of a decentralized blockchain.
So on-chain scaling, can it work?
This is probably one of the few things I agree with Roger Ver about. He’s right, Bitcoin can scale on-chain. DigiByte can too!
Let’s have a bit of a look at the projected numbers, thanks to the DigiSpeed fork in 2015 we’re planning on doubling the block-size every 2 years:
As it stands right now, for some people, that looks pretty bad, but others see it and go “Eh, no big deal”.
Let’s look at this comparing with Bitcoin, because they’re the biggest “On-chain vs off-chain” debaters with Bitcoin vs Bitcoin Cash (And I’m siding with Bitcoin Cash on this one).
You see there’s approx 10,000 full Bitcoin nodes right now. 10,000 copies of the blockchain out there running on the Core PC wallets. That’s not actually that many, and yet, people are worried about this leading to greater centralization.
It’s ironic given we look at Ripple who have a dozen validator nodes and people claim that’s fine. But I digress.
When I look at the above chart, I see “I’m good, on my current internet connection, with my current hard drives, until the year 2025, even presuming every single block between then and now is full”. That’s a MASSIVE assumption that the blocks will be full, given the Top 50 blockchains combined currently only do around 51TPS as of April 2018.
I’m currently on gigabit internet here in little ol’ New Zealand, and I know that our country has plans to go to 10-Gigabit internet in the near future too. For DigiByte to be “as decentralized” as Bitcoin, we only need 10,000 people in the whole planet to have that sort of thing, in the next 8–17 years.
That is *so* doable. Sure, people in developing nations will struggle, but if you look at, say, Venezuela, they’re not going to run a full node right now anyways, even with the Bitcoin blockchain being 140GB, or DigiByte being 8GB.
They were never intended to, Satoshi always expected that most people would run SPV wallets (Such as the DigiByte Mobile wallets). Saves on storage, saves on bandwidth, and we’ll still be more decentralized than the dozen validator nodes Ripple uses.
So how what does Bitcoins scaling look like through to 2035?
Genuinely it’s nothing. 51GB per-year. It’s a piddly amount
What about Bitcoin Cash? Even if we roll with 32MB blocks?
Yep, that’s still totally doable. 1.6TB means I could go for the rest of my life with the current HDDs in my system here on Bitcoin Cash and still not ever have to worry about upgrading.
But back to DigiByte, is it doable?
For sure! I can sustain that current internet usage even into 2035, all that’s going to be an issue is Hard Drive space, and even that’s not too bad. We’re getting more and more dense HDDs and SSDs all the time, not to mention they’re becoming cheaper and cheaper.
Right now, DigiByte does 560TPS, with it doubling every 2 years. Few years from now, DigiByte will be able to keep up with Visa, and a few years later we’ll have totally eclipsed their processing.
Doubling the block size every two years? Definitely the way to go!
Can you scale on-chain? Absolutely you can!
