The world of cryptocurrency is evolving at an unfathomable rate. Technologies that were developed even a few years ago are proving to already be outdated and not at all ready for mainstream audiences. In order for cryptocurrency to continue on its path these problems must be rectified, either by these legacy currencies, or more likely by new ones which will replace them.
Blockchain is the new buzz word, and everyone wants their application to be future ready, with the ability to interact with this fascinating new technology. However, not everyone is prepared for this, blockchain development is so new that it's still a developing skill set, and many businesses are not quite prepared to handle this themselves by creating their own chains. They need something to build on, and at present, that application is Ethereum.
However, Ethereum has experienced some serious problems that need to be rectified quickly. The Crypto Kitties phenomena has shown that the Ethereum network is just too slow to handle main stream applications. The need to handle the huge number of micro transactions involved in this one game caused the gears of the entire network to grind to a halt, and that has made many reconsider their position on this asset.
It was previously thought by many that Ethereum would be immune to the transaction clogging that Bitcoin was experiencing, but that has been proven false. As a result, other projects have now stepped in to try to rectify this with various scaling solutions. Unfortunately, none has made it easy for the many applications already utilizing the Ethereum chain to move their operations, until now.
Go Chain wants to continue the evolution of the blockchain based application infrastructure. Their chain not only will allow for faster transaction times, but they also address some of the other key weaknesses that have popped up. They're also going to make moving to a new chain seamless for existing Ethereum applications.
Weaknesses of the current cryptocurrency ecosystem.
- Network scalability
- Transaction speed
- Transaction cost
- Growing centralization
- Energy consumption
I'm sure originally it was not imagined that any of these things would be a problem for cryptocurrencies. However, the rapid rate of cryptocurrencies development has negatively affected all of these areas. While once sending Bitcoin was a very cheap and easy task, it's now become more difficult. Due to the nature of the proof of work mechanism which handles both Bitcoin and Ethereum, these networks can quickly become clogged when too many transactions are present.
This results in either transactions being halted completely, or the fees rising to astronomical levels to cover it. Our current set up simply can not handle mainstream adoption. These currencies can not handle enough transactions per second to become viable for the bulk of our world's population.
It also becomes much more difficult to scale a proof of work set up such as this that not only requires many miners to verify the transactions, but also an enormous amount of electricity. Many inside and outside of the space are becoming very critical of the perceived ecological impacts of proof of work mining.
What's more is that now the cost to set up a mining operation in order to be competitive has risen outside the reach of most people, and now a small number of miners can control all of it. The growing pains have become apparent, and now everyone is scrambling for a fix.
Go Chain, and The Proof of Reputation solution.
If you are unfamiliar with an algorithm such as this one, it's based on the proof of authority set up. When using Proof of Reputation as a consensus model, instead of staking an investment such as with a proof of stake model, holders will instead stake their reputation. This means the validator for a chain must be known, and when the anonymity is taken away people tend to behave better, as this means their personal lives could be negatively affected by their actions if they do something unsavory.
A set up such as this could arguably prove more secure than a proof of stake algorithm. What's more is that the Go Chain platform actually validates based on the reputation of companies who have much more to lose than an individual should they act poorly within their chosen ecosystem.
The other benefit to using a solution such as this is that it is also much easier to scale a network. Much like proof of stake, there's no need for massive amounts of hardware and electricity to validate transactions using Proof of Reputation. In addition to being more energy efficient, the transaction speeds are superior to that of Ethereum by 100 times or more. Proof of Reputation also allows for better decentralization, since verifying power can be more evenly distributed. Go Chain plans to spread these network participants across 50 different countries to fight network centralization.
The beta release for the Go Chain platform is already live, and it has been able to surpass 1,300 transactions per second. The chain is also fully compatible with all existing Ethereum assets including wallets, tokens and applications. This means that it would be quite easy for existing Ethereum application developers to make the switch and to take advantage of this new, stronger platform. The Dapp platform of the future needs to be flexible, scalable and easy to integrate with, and it seems GoChain is prepared to tick all the right boxes here.
GoChain Whitepaper
GoChain on Twitter
This was my entry for the OriginalWorks Contest.
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