Nakamoto & Avalanche
Secure, Efficient, Instant L1 Hybrid at Mass-Scale
#Bitcoin’s Nakamoto Consensus is revolutionary and the publication of #Avalanche Consensus in 2018 was also groundbreaking. Yet both protocols have their strengths and weaknesses.
We asked: what if we could use their unique properties to complement each other?
In simple terms, Bitcoin’s Nakamoto Consensus keeps a “written history” that is secure and fully trustless, but inefficient. Avalanche Consensus on the other hand is efficient & fast at keeping an “oral history”. But just like speech is fleeting, Avalanche is unfortunately only trustless if you are there in the moment to witness it. Bootstrapping a new node with Avalanche would only be possible in a trusted manner for example.
Why we went for Avalanche
The eCash project is building a network that will be able to scale massively. Since the beginning of the project, the development team has declared what is necessary to achieve a competitive global scale.
One item needed is “Pre-Consensus”. Which we can achieve by using the Avalanche protocol. It enables fully secure settlement of transactions within 3 seconds. This transaction “finalization” through Avalanche is fully independent of block confirmations, which is how transactions are settled over time via Nakamoto Consensus.
This rapid finality also allows efficient coordination between miners, who aren’t limited to communicating only every 10 minutes through Nakamoto’s inefficient consensus anymore. Mining nodes could share information and compute a block template over the entire 10 minute block finding process, instead of being idle 99% of the time until a block was found.
Imagine a group of miners still writing down all the necessary transaction history as always, in Nakamoto’s “inefficient but secure” manner. It takes a lot of time to write down, but once it is set, everyone can look it up at any given time and doesn’t have to trust someone else’s word to figure out the network’s transaction history.
But in between that process of writing everything down every 10 minutes, they can share what they are writing by talking to each other and coordinating a shared block template which will be propagated, by whoever finds it first. Instead of computing everything at the very last second, when the new block was propagated, they used the time between the finding of the block to create a shared template that already has everything sorted and ready up to the very last transaction.
When the Avalanche whitepaper came out in 2018, the eCash development team immediately started implementing it on top of the eCash Nakamoto consensus from scratch (not connected to #AVAX blockchain)
As explained above, it doesn’t replace the core Nakamoto consensus but compliments it. We have our cake and eat it, too as we now have the perfect combination of all strengths of both Nakamoto and Avalanche Consensus; but also have both protocols negate each other's weaknesses!
This is a groundbreaking approach to fixing the “Blockchain Trilemma”
We retain our permissionless nature (often rather sloppily referred to as “decentralization”) while we gain bulletproof security, efficiency, and one of the fastest time-to-finality in the industry.
On top of that, Avalanche streamlines upgrade, removing the need for hard-forks, which were always a big engineering effort. It also enables sidechain capabilities, allowing anyone to run their own “subnet” with arbitrary rule changes. This creates an ideal platform for developers to innovate on top of eCash without having to modify the consensus layer.
Conclusion
Along with our self-funding mechanism and further roadmap milestones, some of which will draw from our Avalanche integration on eCash as its foundational technology, we’ll have a neutral, permissionless, trustless, scalable, efficient, viable, extensible, interoperable, and super secure cryptocurrency network ready for tomorrow’s economy.
A real blockchain and Bitcoin innovation!
The eCash development team (also known as Bitcoin ABC) doesn’t take shortcuts, undermining their decentralization principles.
Yet, they’re open for necessary innovation, implemented with #XECellence and efficiency despite being a small team with fewer resources than the usual corporate coins.
#innovation #technology #web3 #blockchain #Layer1 #Bitcoin
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