In this article, I am planning to cover future technology trends of block chain at a high level
dICO
decentralized ICO. Traditional ICOs are not decentralized. They have several problems because of their centralization.
First, a traditional ICO takes place on a single node. For instance, you might purchase an ICO token on a website, which is running on a single server. The process of making the purchase is handled by this one server. No matter how fast the machine, the software to accept your funds can only accept one transaction at a time.
Second, a user must send their funds to the ICO website, where the funds are held in escrow. This period of holding and validating transactions can takes weeks, if not months, before the ICO tokens are distributed
Sophisticated and wealthy bot programmers (often called “whales”) have an unfair ability to purchase the coin supply during the opening moments. Observe the histories of Decentraland and Binance for examples. In both cases, all the ICO tokens sold out in moments. As the demand for the products was highly likely to rise, the whales had merely to wait a few months, and then sell their tokens to the less wealthy and less technically savvy audience at a dramatically increased price.
dICO created more opportunities to average investors. After you make your traditional ICO purchase and your funds are sitting in escrow, it is extremely vulnerable to human faults such as hacking, theft etc
when a dICO is released, not all of the coins are located on one server. Instead, they are split up and scattered across as many nodes as the dICO administrator chooses (some can use upwards of ~100 separate servers). A whale trying to purchase all the supply would have to purchase everything at each server simultaneously – an extremely hard thing to do.
Secondly, in a dICO, the creator has the option to program the coins to release not all at once, but rather at a customized rate.
For instance, 45% of the supply could be available immediately, then 15% releases a few days later, and so on until the entire supply is available. Now, a whale would have to continually compete for days on end to purchase the entire supply.
DEX
The current, most practical method for crypto currency exchange requires the use of centralized exchange services. Such centralized solutions require vouchers to perform the exchange. Among many dangers present in this system, end-users are under the constant risk of their assets being stolen either by an inside theft or an outside hack. Furthermore, the operators of centralized exchanges an exhibit bias in how they facilitate trading among their users. They can also create fake levels of volume on their exchange. To eliminate such dangers and limitations requires the creation of a decentralized-exchange alternative.
A decentralized exchange is an exchange market that does not rely on a third party service to hold the customer's funds. Instead, trades occur directly between users (peer to peer) through an automated process. This system can be achieved by creating proxy tokens (crypto assets that represent a certain fiat or crypto currency) or assets (that can represent shares in a company for example) or through a decentralized multi-signature escrow system, among other solutions that are currently being developed.
The most obvious benefit to using a decentralized exchange over a centralized one is their trust less nature. You are not required to trust the security or honesty of the exchange since the funds are held by you in your personal wallet and not by a third party.
Another advantage to the decentralized model is the privacy it provides.
Users are not required to disclose their personal details to anyone, except if the exchange method involves bank transfers, in which case your identity is revealed only to the person that is selling or buying from you.
Furthermore, the hosting of decentralized exchanges is distributed through nodes meaning that there is no risk of server downtime.
Atomic swap
Atomic swaps, or atomic cross-chain trading, is the exchange of one crypto currency to another crypto currency, without the need to trust a third-party. A relatively new piece of technology, atomic cross-chain trading is looking to revolutionize the way in which users transact with each other. For example, if Alice owned 5 Bitcoins but instead wanted 100 Litecoins, she would have to go through an exchange, i.e. a third-party. However, with atomic swaps, if Bob owned 100 Litecoins but instead wanted 5 Bitcoins, then Bob and Alice could make a trade. In order to prevent, for example, Alice accepting Bob’s 100 Litecoins but then failing to send over her 5 Bitcoins, atomic swaps utilizes what is known as hash time-locked contracts (HTLCs).
Hash time-locked contracts ensure that the atomic swap process is completely trust less by ensuring both fulfill the requirements of the trade. HTLCs require the recipient of a payment to acknowledge receiving payment prior to a deadline by generating a cryptographic proof of payment. Or the recipient risks losing the right to the claim the payment, therefore returning the funds back to the sender.
Therefore, for a trade between Alice and Bob to take place, both must submit their transaction to their respective block chain, Alice on the Bitcoin block chain and Bob on the Litecoin block chain. In order for Alice to claim the 100 Litecoins sent from Bob, she must produce a number that only she knows, used to generate a cryptographic hash, therefore providing proof of payment. Similarly, in order for Bob to claim the 5 Bitcoins that was sent from Alice, he must also provide the same number, that was used to generate the cryptographic hash.
Block chain meeting IoT
By combining block chain and IoT more and more advanced applications like intelligent insurance policies, cooperatively owned self driving cars, shared machinery, community shared solar energy, waste water treatment systems, shared office spaces etc will evolve and more transparency will come in these applications
PoS, DpoW, HoneyBadgerBFT
More and more new consensus algorithms will come which will reduce energy consumption, increase performance and increased security.
In proof-of-stake public block chains, like Ethereum’s upcoming Casper implementation, a set of validators each bet on blocks they deem likely to be validated, and the weight of each validators vote depends on the size of its deposit. Punishments are levied on bad actors who bet on more than one block at a certain depth or who don’t participate when they are supposed to.
Delayed Proof of Work (dPoW) is a hybrid consensus method that allows one block chain to take advantage of the security provided through the hashing power of a secondary block chain. This is achieved through a group of notary nodes that add data from the first block chain onto the second, which would then require both block chains to be compromised to undermine the security of the first.
Most fault tolerant protocols (including RAFT, PBFT, Zyzzyva, Q/U) don't guarantee good performance when there are Byzantine faults. Even the so-called "robust" BFT protocols (like UpRight, RBFT, Prime, Spinning, and Stellar) have various hard-coded timeout parameters, and can only guarantee performance when the network behaves approximately as expected - hence they are best suited to well-controlled settings like corporate data centers.
HoneyBadgerBFT is fault tolerance for the wild wild wide-area-network. HoneyBadger nodes can even stay hidden behind anonymizing relays like Tor, and the purely-asynchronous protocol will make progress at whatever rate the network supports.
Cloud providers supporting block chain platforms
One of the main drawback of block chain adaption in enterprises is the lack of best development environments for different block chain platforms. In future most of these problems will be solved as big companies like IBM, Microsoft, AWS will be releasing their tools.
Inter operable block chains
The number of block chains and distributed ledger networks has exploded in the last year. As established networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum are hitting both economic and technical scaling limitations, migration to other chains is becoming a necessity for many developers, miners, and entrepreneurs.
Diverse networks competing for a share of the crypto market have unique advantages and disadvantages. As time goes on, it is becoming clearer that there is no perfect solution to all block chain needs. There are trade-offs that have to be made in development to optimize a block chain for specific purposes.
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