Bite-Sized Entry #1: Security
How does Wavelet’s security compare to other blockchains, and why is security important?
Blockchains are valuable because they allow you to make transactions on a distributed public ledger in a way that no one can change (immutable), which allows anyone to trust the state of the ledger.
We say a blockchain is secure when the ledger stays immutable, no one is able to double-spend their money, or create other forms of fraudulent transactions. Blockchains enforce these security rules with consensus mechanisms that different peers use to agree on the state of the ledger.
Problems With Current Blockchains
The two popular protocols used by blockchains in the current market are proof-of-work (POW) and proof-of-stake (POS).
To make it simple, and bite-sized… maybe a couple minutes read…
Proof-of-work
Most POW follows the longest chain rule, where nodes follow the longest chain of blocks since the most computational power was used for that chain to be built. However, mining a block only requires computational power, which can easily be bought with money. Big entities, such as corporations and governments, could simply buy a lot of computational power and build on top of themselves to artificially make the longest chain. This threatens security as this makes it possible for everyone to centralize onto an artificially created chain under one corporation.
Furthermore, this protocol will take forever to resolve conflicts since the longest chain rule can only work if ONLY one longest chain can be found, otherwise, the search continues until the longest chain shows up. It’s not scalable if it takes too much time.
Proof-of-stake
POS involves a group of validators, called a committee, deciding which transactions are valid. This forces the majority, who are not validators, to depend on and be lead by a committee of strangers. If the committee was to be jeopardized, the validation process of transactions would come to a halt and the system would fail. Putting too much dependency on the committee is not secure.
You could try to increase the number of validators to minimalize the damage during jeopardy, but that also exponentially increases the communication required for transaction validation. This results in longer validation time, making it not scalable.
Thus POS is bottlenecked as you have to compromise either security or scalability. To learn more about the problems with POS, click here.
Wavelet’s Solution
Our solution to the problems faced by current blockchains is to let nodes make their own decision on right and wrong using statistical sampling techniques.
We don’t use computational power to build upon transactions, so corporations can’t simply buy out the system, and we don’t depend on committees to decide on the valid transactions. This makes Wavelet secure. Furthermore, nodes don’t require communication with committees or follow the longest chain as they can make their own decisions using statistical sampling techniques. This makes Wavelet scalable.
To learn more about how Wavelet works, click here.
It’s definitely a lot more complicated than this, but the overall idea is that you won’t be facing the same security and scalability issues faced by current POW and POS protocols.
More info
Since this was a bite-sized entry, this was very simplified to keep things short but still show the main ideas. For those who want more details, the following links are here to satisfy your thirst for knowledge:
Wavelet: An Introduction
Wavelet: Staking and Decentralization
Why Leaderless?
