True Scalability (Building a Future-Proof Network)
Many currencies today aim to act as a full replacement for traditional fiat currency, yet not many can really allow for the full transactional scope of a country’s economy to be processed. Imagine all the transactions that take place on a daily or even hourly basis, perhaps even by the minute. For some projects, these important considerations fall by the wayside in favor of not insignificant, but less pressing matters leaving a significant bottleneck in network performance and hurting overall adoptability as a result. Reasons like this leave Bitcoin in an awkward position, with the only chance of being practical for daily operation all pinned on the lightning network. The lightning system has absolute merit, but arguably may not even be enough to satisfy global transaction pressure.
It stands to reason that a project that was designed from the outset for maximum TPS and overall throughput would be ideal for such an application, posturing well for use in daily life. Pascal is indeed that project, created and operated by a dedicated team of entrepreneurs whose one goal has been creating and perfecting this system from the ground up. The method chosen is unlike any other, the Safebox-an impressive piece of technology that enables full nodes to operate with significantly less data bloat, achieving exponentially higher throughput-per-unit-of-storage than any other.
Exactly what and how the SafeBox operates is rather simple, it is like a spreadsheet, denoting each user account on a row and each column denotes a property of that account, rendering an address to a simple index in the Safebox. This is more like a simple ledger of all user funds rather than a full ledger. Upon the minting of a new block, all operations contained mutate the Safebox, the hash of which must then be referenced by the next block in order to qualify as a new block. The blockchain is only used to mutate the Safebox, though regular POW mining is needed to facilitate consensus-though its not permanently required. This enabled the entire blockchain to be deleted without any security compromise whatsoever.
The key to high transaction throughput per unit of storage is the requirement for the ledger balance for consensus rather than the entire ledger. Though this is impressive, it doesn’t necessarily mean infinite scalability. What does however is the ability for blocks to be deleted past a checkpointing height of 100. New blocks will be appointed from the top of the chain and old ones deleted off the bottom, checkpoints are made every 100th block and are simply compressed Safeboxes. New nodes are only required to download the latest checkpoint and a dozen or so blocks, all with the capability to independently compute and verify the cumulative work required to construct the SafeBox structure. The result is a chain that is effectively a rolling snapshot of user balances, with a handful of archival nodes held in reserve for security measures despite each full node having the capability to reconstruct the full Safebox.
