2017 was the year in which took off on a global scale. People across the globe began investing in them, and the increasing demand led to an all-time high of $19,666 in December 2017. However, even though digital currencies may appear on the surface to be enjoying their glory days, a lot of internal conflicts are currently bogging down the technology.
Drawing Political Lines in Digital Sand
Opinion is principally divided among two groups of developers. One is defined by its desires to make the blockchain network more secure and robust to external threats. The other is pushing for bleeding-edge innovation at all costs.
Take, for instance, the core developers of bitcoin. , launched in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto, runs on the Proof Of Work () consensus mechanism. The developers working on the network are wary of security threats and actively try to make the network immune to hacks.
On the other side of this argument, are those who take the more liberal approach. On July 20, 2015, the was created by , writer, and co-founder of bitcoin Magazine.
The community may seem distinct today, but there is no denying that they branched out from the first every cryptocurrency.
bitcoin was popularly promoted as a decentralized global currency that would take banking to the unbanked.
With Ethereum, Buterin wanted to make that dream a reality, while also developing a platform where developers could create their own decentralized apps using the smart contract feature.
Put bluntly, the liberals of the crypto sphere promote adoption of more cutting-edge innovations and are open to items such as the , which is a second level payment protocol that verifies transactions off the main blockchain and depends on it only in case of a discrepancy or settlement.
Thus, it does not require all nodes in the network to verify the same transaction.
How to Balance Security with Improvement
While one group that the development will make the network faster by processing more transactions with lesser transfer fees, the other group opposes this by stating that efficiency must not come at the cost of security.
A special characteristic of the is that it can be used to open a peer to peer payment transfer channel without involving any other third party. While immediately tantalizing, upon further investigation, these new protocols are not without their pitfalls.
As secure as Buterin’s development has been, an unidentified attacker managed to drain the Ethereum-based DAO project of more than 3.6 million ether on June 18, 2017. The DAO attack took place due to a bug in the code and was concluded to not be due to a fault of the Ethereum blockchain. Nevertheless, the hack was sufficient to convince a bunch of developers that there was a need to make the blockchain more secure.
In an , Andreas Antonopoulos initially described the lofty, philosophical changes that have driven bitcoin’s development as our civilization’s attempts to “attempt to scale governance models to manage greater and greater numbers of people.”
“Presently, we use hierarchies that aggregate information up a bureaucratic structure, where decisions are made at the top and actions taken to the bottom. And for two centuries, this model has worked well to massively scale up human organization.”
It remains to be seen whether the two groups pushing for security and innovation will finally arrive at a compromise and work in unison.
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It’s crazy to think that less than ten years ago in 2011, one bitcoin traded for less than $1.
Fast forward today, in March 2018, and . If that isn’t a good investment, then I don’t know what is.
However, bitcoin is far from the most exciting thing about blockchain technology…
The possibilities of the blockchain are endless. However, as it stands, there are several technical bottlenecks that are preventing the technology from reaching its full potential.
By removing these bottlenecks, we can make way for a brand new era of innovation and creativity.
The Benefits of Blockchain Technology
In simple terms, we can think of the . It records all transactions in a secure, transparent manner.
Essentially, it can be thought of as a technological “trust machine.” It eliminates the need for us to trust our counterparties, and it also eliminates the need for a third-party to act as an intermediary.
This is because, unlike banks that facilitate the transfers of fiat currency, the blockchain enables the free transfer of cryptocurrency through a decentralized environment.
The advent of the blockchain has brought many benefits to our society. And despite what many have been led to think, .
, voting, accounting, and quality assurance are only some of the industries that have the potential to be completely revolutionized by the advent of the blockchain.
In many cases, steps are already being taken to give these sectors a complete overhaul.
Pushing Forward With Blockchain Technology Means Removing the Bottlenecks
Right now, the majority of today’s endeavors are focused on using blockchain technology for the purpose of enhancing the internal systems of current financial institutions. However, this severely limits the potential of crypto finance.
is advancing at an extremely fast pace, and we are witnessing a shift from the “Internet of Things (IoT)” toward the “Internet of Value (IoV).”
However, as it stands, blockchain has several bottlenecks that need to be addressed before significant progression is made. Currently, interoperability, scalability, and usability are all significant issues that are hindering large-scale blockchain adoption.
Interoperability is perhaps the most pressing issue of these three. Right now, the Internet of Value has difficulty communicating values between different blockchains – not to mention off-chain values and off-chain data. This severely limits its scalability. As a result, the Internet of Value cannot support heavier projects, which decreases the usability.
How Can We Remove These Bottlenecks?
There are many different ways we can approach the solution to this problem.
is one blockchain startup that thinks they may have figured out a way to solve the problem.
The application can fulfill almost all of the functionality of traditional finance – and in a more distributed, efficient, and cheaper manner.
Of course, this is only the beginning; its true potential is far greater. Current cryptocurrencies have only achieved very limited functions of a complete crypto finance system.
FUSION aims to establish a public blockchain as an inclusive crypto finance platform that will lead us into the new era of the “Internet of Value (IoV).”
It will connect both centralized and decentralized organizations, thereby balancing authentication and anonymity, and integrating both on-chain and off-chain data. It will also integrate all cryptocurrencies, including both those that currently exist, and those that are yet to be created.
The FUSION tokens (also known as FSN) will be embedded in the public blockchain in order to sustain the project. It is predicted that these will eventually be used as the ‘gas’ of future cross-chain financial projects.
There will be a total of 81.92 million FSN tokens in circulation.
The Future of the Blockchain
As we continue to power forward towards the Internet of Value, it is becoming increasingly clear that the blockchain’s bottlenecks are something we cannot ignore.
The sooner we solve these issues, the sooner we will be able to move forward and utilize blockchain technology to its full potential.
If platforms like FUSION prove to be a success, we could be about to witness a complete overhaul of the financial system as we have come to know it.
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