How Block Times Prevent Widespread Adoption
DAGs are removing one of the biggest barriers to the mainstream usage of cryptocurrencies.
A collective sigh of relief was heard with the invention of blockchain–here was a basis that could be used for a completely decentralisedcurrency. Banks would not be in control of our hard-earned cash, and neither would central authorities have complete governance over it.
Then, along came Ethereum. Suddenly, not only could blockchains be used to facilitate transactions using decentralised currencies (for example, Bitcoin), we now had a framework for decentralised application development.
However, whether you’re a Bitcoin purist, an Ethereum diehard or a big fan of Litecoin, there’s a glaring issue that’s the same for all — the time it takes for a block to be mined.
Blocks are one of the most fundamental concepts in a blockchain. When you send BTC, ETH, or any of the other blockchain-based currencies and tokens, your transaction is (hopefully) included in a block. Blocks are pretty much just chunks of transactions, and many blockchains use PoW (Proof of Work). They are also instrumental in determining the difficultly of mining. There is an interesting article hereif you’re interested in statistics on block times and difficulty adjustments.
So, how long does it take for a block of transactions to be confirmed? The number varies:
On average:
Bitcoin has a 10 minute block time
Litecoin lowers that by a factor of 4 to 2.5 minutes
Ethereum’s block time is between 16 seconds
What this means is at minimum your Bitcoin transaction will take 10 minutes to confirm once. Ethereum is much faster at ~16 seconds, however this can be orders of magnitude higher due to derpy-looking cats or a popular ICO (one user spent 28.9 Ether in transaction fees ensuring they got in for BAT’s crowdsale).
Now we’re getting to the real issue here — how can this compete with a centralised alternative? Visa boasts that it can handle over 24,000 transactions per second. Disregarding the issues it might cause, halving Ethereum’s block time wouldn’t even achieve this.
In the real-world, waiting minutes for payments to confirm is a step backwards, especially while standing in a physical store. Likewise for merchants, who don’t want to let a customer leave until their payment has been received.
Here’s where DAGs come in.
DAGs, or Directed Acyclic Graphs don’t rely on a single, continuously confirmed blockchain. Think of the standard blockchain like a single stick constantly added to and lengthened in a straight line — a DAG functions as a network of interlocking branches growing outwards in multiple directions. Transactions can be confirmed orders of magnitude faster while remaining decentralised, as each block only needs to confirm the previous transaction.
FANTOM is breaking down the barrier to widespread adoption that blockchains and their associated block times have created — the OPERA Chain should be able to facilitate more than 300,000transactions a second. Transaction throughput and processing capacity will increase with more widespread-usage, where others have hit scalability issues, FANTOM will thrive.
Let that all sink in. We’re looking at the last piece of the puzzle and we are not far away.
FANTOM will make the payment processing structure of the world more transparent and more reliable — come and join us on this journey.
