In today’s article we’d like to review 2 Technologies that lie at the core of All Digital currencies: blockchain and tangle. We won’t look too deep into details, It’s just going to be a short overview all these two technologies. We are going to try to find out which one is better in the long term and which one is going to win eventually.
What are blockchain and tangle
Blockchain is the cryptographically secured distributed data storage Network. Information is added to the blockchain and stored in blocks. With blockchain we have a ledger where we can see any Bitcoin transaction That has ever occurred. If you connect to any specific user’s wallet you can trace any transaction that has been done with it.
With Tangle this scenario is completely different.
Tangle technology is based on a Directed Acylic Graph, which consists of a certain number of edges and vertices. Given such basis you can’t go back to the same vertex you came from.
Tangle leis underneath IOTA and Byteball cryptocurrency. Blockchain lies beneath Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and many other altcoins.
How do blockchain and tangle work
Blockchain: a message is pushed to the network and each node receives this message. Then these nodes update their copy of the Bitcoin ledger to show the changes. This transaction must be set in the block of a miner and it gets more chances to get there the higher is the fee. Also, the transaction with the higher fee is confirmed faster.
Transaction fees are one of Bitcoin’s problems as they only tend to get higher with time.
Tangle: if you want to make a new transaction you have to check and approve two transactions which took place before yours. The more users there are in the network, the more transactions for the approvement of to previous transactions there are, thus the network grows faster and faster.
With the blockchain the situation is vice versa: the more users there are, the slower is the network. And the more expensive is each transaction.
Tangle’s advantages
- No fees
- The more users, the faster it works
Speed
Blockchain: the network slows down as more users get into it. It takes more time to confirm transactions, some may take more than 12 hours and even up to 1 or 2 days if the transaction is sent with a very low fee. If we look back into the past we can see that the average confirmation time was about 15 minutes in May 2016. Now in December 2017 it is more than 400 minutes.
Tangle: here the situation is the opposite. The network works faster when more users and get into it. As IOTA gets more popular it only works faster.
Microtransactions
This is another huge issue that people are talking about. You can’t send a transaction under $100 in Bitcoin efficiently. As the whole purpose of the decentralized currency is to let people easily send payments to each other, this may become a huge problem in the nearest future.
Blockchain: Currently there is no use in Bitcoin for microtransactions as it is too expensive. If you want to send a $5 payment you will pay a fee over $3 to fulfill this.
Tangle: as we’ve already mentioned above tangle transactions come without fees. It makes this technology perfect for microtransactions.
Scalability
Blockchain: This is where Bitcoin has one more huge problem to cope with. As more and more people use Bitcoin, blockchain just can’t handle that much of transactions efficiently.Transactions take more time to be confirmed, they cost more and the scalability suffers.
Tangle: On the contrary, tangle is pretty scalable and it has all the resources to handle more transactions over time.
Conclusion
As you see, tangle wins over blockchain in all the aspects. Most likely it will be used in a much broader way in the future. However, Bitcoin is a much more popular cryptocurrency and it will continue growing as well. Bitcoin can be used pretty well for the long-term investment, though.
