Blended Performance: A Technical Basis for the Business Blockchain User
BAC’s mission is to create a platform that businesses around the world find easy to use, in order to unlock value through blockchain technology.
This may sound less inspired than the lofty missions of some projects to disrupt the very foundations of banking or advertising. However, a BAC guiding principle holds that only when the benefits of blockchain are readily available to those who don’t necessarily care about the technology’s world-changing power, will blockchain truly start enjoying the rates of adoption that can realize such potential.
To that end, and from a technological standpoint, what enterprise solutions most require is a balance of speed and stability. We have nothing but respect for the EOS team and what they’re accomplishing. Yet we point them out here for comparison as aiming for high transactions per second (TPS) at what some may consider the expense of stability, as detailed below.
FAST AND RELIABLE
The balance of speed and stability BAC strives for can be seen in our blockchain database structure, which will feature an IPFS-like file storage solution, allowing for data to be cryptographically stored, whereas data cannot be stored in a traditional SQL database.
That quest for balance is also evident in BAC’s pioneering use of delegated proof of work (DpoW) consensus. The scalability advantage and 51% -attack vulnerability of the proof of work consensus are well-known. Delegated proof of work addresses that latter threat by making selection of which miner sets the hash task and difficulty completely random among currently active miners and nodes. Completion of a block starts the random selection process again.
The figure below illustrates our DPoW process:
This “confusion mechanism” approach addresses the dependability issue of Byzantine Fault Tolerance, while still maintaining optimal performance. That same mechanism will be employed for transactions, ensuring anonymity and a respectable starting point of 1,500 TPS on launch of mainnet.
As to long-term stability, EOS recently announced that they would increase the size of their blocks by 1k, a paltry sum, until one considers the extra 62GB of RAM necessitated for transactions each year*. Other unintended consequences of the quest for highest TPS may well occur.
FLEXIBLE AND ACCESSIBLE
“Customer first” is another BAC principle, so easy to understand as to be cliché, yet how many tech projects suffer from lack of applying it? From the customer-first viewpoint, few businesses will appreciate the need for a compromise between speed and stability in a blockchain platform.
Instead, what they know they require is a product that is easy to use, and easy to apply to multiple scenarios.
Get Ernie Diaz’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Persuading executive managers to integrate a blockchain solution is outside the scope of this tech-focused article. Instead, let us make our case to the CTO, and outline the three features of the BAC platform that an organization’s ever-more-important developers will find accessible and easy, in comparison to other blockchain products.
- A layered architecture for modular development, as outlined in the graphic below:
Notice that the customer-facing layer allows for multiple nodes of access, be it cloud service or personal computer, via all three major operating systems, not just Linux, as is current status quo.
Meanwhile, the core layer offers all key blockchain products through a simple API that allows for rapid development and deployment on the application layer.
2. Sidechains for secure blockchain development, testing, and implementation environments.
3. BAC itself will actually allow for any consensus protocol, not just DPoW but also traditional PoW, PoS, DPoS, even the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) protocol, for those who use BAC as their private blockchain.
4. The pioneering bună programming language. A blockchain platform is only as useful as the ability of developers to create applications and smart contracts on it. EOS, for all its many fine qualities, uses C++ for development, which is unwieldy and inefficient for programmers.
By contrast, bună is light and Turing-complete (able to write any function), and best of all, very similar to Javascript and Node.js , the world’s most common programming environment. This means that business organizations will not have to compete for and invest in ever-scarcer “blockchain programming experts”, but rather be able to convert local developers into valuable blockchain-programmers, in short-term time frames.
The BAC team is hard at work at a final upgrade to bună that will take its smart contracts to Bytecode Virtual Machine, the most advanced level of smart contract deployment, only offered by Ethereum and EOS at this time of writing.
CHANGE BUSINESSES CAN BELIEVE IN
BAC’s goal is more ambitious than it sounds. Helping ordinary enterprises worldwide unlock the value of blockchain technology will be no easy task. Most businesses are far more resistant to technological transformation than the growing legions of cryptocurrency fans and decentralization advocates.
However, we are dedicated to providing the speed and safety, as well as flexibility and accessibility, that will make adoption of blockchain tech as palatable as possible to business decision-makers. We believe our technical infrastructure lays a great foundation for making the case.
*21 nodes producing 12 blocks per 6 seconds = 172800 extra kb per day, or 62gb per year.
