On Chain Scalability

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  • The biggest barrier for block-chains today is scalability. Visa the credit card company can handle around 2000 transactions per second (TPS) today. This allows them to ensure customer security and transactional rates nation-wide. Bitcoin currently sits at around 7 TPS and Litecoin at 28 TPS (56 TPS with SegWit). All the technological innovations I’ve mentioned above come together to allow for DigiByte to be the fastest PoW blockchain in the world and the most scalable.

 

  • DigiByte is scalable because of DigiSpeed, the protocol through which block times are decreased and block sizes are increased. It is known that a simple increase in block size can increase the TPS of any block-chain, such is the case with Bitcoin Cash. This is however not scalable. The reason a simple increase in block size is not scalable is because it would eventually lead to some if not a great amount of centralization. This centralization occurs because larger block sizes mean that storage costs and thus hardware cost for miners increases. This increase along with full blocks – meaning many transactions occurring on the chain – will inevitably bar out the average miner after difficulty increases and mining centres consolidate.

 

  • Hardware cost, and storage costs decrease over time following Moore’s law and DigiByte adheres to it perfectly. DigiSpeed calls for the increase in block sizes and decrease in block timing every two years by a factor of two. This means that originally DigiByte’s block sizes were 1 MB at 30 seconds each at inception in 2014. In 2016 DigiByte increased block size by two and decreased block timing by the same factor. Perfectly following Moore’s law. Moore’s law dictates that in general hardware increases in power by a factor of two while halving in cost every year.

 

  • This would allow for DigiByte to scale at a steady rate and for people to adopt new hardware at an equally steady rate and reasonable expense. Thus so, the average miner can continue to mine DigiByte on his algorithm of choice with entry level hardware.

 

  • DigiByte was one of the first block chains to adopt segregated witness (SegWit in April 2017) a protocol whereby a part of transactional data is removed and stored elsewhere to decrease transaction data weight and thus increase scalability and speed. This allows us to fit more transactions per block which does not increase in size!

 

  • DigiByte currently sits at 560 TPS and could scale to over 280,000 TPS by 2035. This dwarfs any of the TPS capacities; even projected/possible capacities of some coins and even private companies. In essence DigiByte could scale worldwide today and still be reliable and robust. DigiByte could even handle the cumulative transactions of all the top 50 coins in Coin Market Cap and still run smoothly and below capacity. In fact, to max out DigiByte’s actual maximum capacity (today at 560 TPS) you would have to take all these transactions and multiply them by a factor of 10!