The Holy Grail of Crypto | Part 1/4: #fast
Recently, the Stealth team found itself discussing a vision for the perfect cryptocurrency. We came up with a list of four features that we considered essential:
- Fast
- Feeless
- Private
- Scalable
After thinking about this list for a while, one of us observed that combined, these four features represent the “Holy Grail of Crypto”. In fact, we were so inspired by this description that we registered holygrailofcrypto.com and pointed it to stealth.org. We have also launched a social media campaign that makes hashtags of these terms, to highlight our main objectives for Stealth (XST). We kicked off this effort with a November 2018 ad campaign on CoinDesk.
The Holy Grail of Crypto: #fast, #feeless, #private, and #scalable
The Holy Grail of Crypto should have #fast, #feeless, and #private transactions. On top of these features, the underlying platform should be #scalable to thousands of transactions per second. We intend for qPoS to meet these four requirements.
Here, and in several following short blog posts, I present our interpretation of each of #fast, #feeless, #private, and #scalable, and explain how they define our vision for XST. The first hashtag, and the subject of the remainder of today’s post, is #fast.
#fast
Stealth will have #fast transactions made possible by 5 second block times. Fast transactions are fundamental to the usability of any payment system, providing users with a better experience. They also significantly reduce problems with online payments, and are critical to point of sale usability.
Fast transactions in XST will be made possible by Quantum Proof-of-Stake (qPoS). In qPoS, block validators are required to be permanently bonded by irreversibly converting XST into assets called “stakers”. Because there is a finite and known number of stakers, each with a significant financial interest in the Stealth platform, the qPoS protocol organizes block signers into a queue that signs blocks in rounds. Each round, each signer has a small window of time to validate a block. This queue, along with the financial incentives to use good hardware, ensures that blocks are signed every 5 seconds, making XST transactions so fast they are almost instant.
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Hondo
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