The Road to Trillion Market Value: Three Routes for Future Smart Contract Platforms Ethereum, Polkadot, and BSV
Editor's Note: This article comes fromVernacular Blockchain (ID: hellobtc), Author: Five Fireball Leader, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
Editor's Note: This article comes from
Vernacular Blockchain (ID: hellobtc)
Vernacular Blockchain (ID: hellobtc)
, Author: Five Fireball Leader, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
I saw an article some time ago, which probably meant the 10 years of the blockchain. In fact, it is very complicated, but it is also very simple.
There are dozens of other public chains that no one cares about, all staring at these star projects. Anyway, there is no real original technology development capability. Wherever these star projects have developed the blockchain and what new technologies are available, they can be used directly.
Although it sounds heart-wrenching to say this, but in truth, there is really nothing wrong with it. In terms of originality, if Bitcoin counts as one, ETH can count as half, and EOS may only have 0.1 left. As for the vast majority of other blockchain projects, they may be infinitely approaching 0.
The importance of this half-innovation of Ethereum - the smart contract to the blockchain really cannot be overemphasized. After all, after this, the blockchain finally got rid of the extremely simple operation that you can only transfer a few coins to me, and I transfer a few coins to him. In the era of deep system interaction, although the performance is still scum.
After various attempts of expansion in the past two years, many Layer 2 projects, sharding and the bleak situation of Ethereum Plasma, finally, in this critical year of the 10-year blockchain, we have basically determined the three future smart contract platforms: This article summarizes the major development directions here. Similar to the mysterious space-time proof adopted by emerging public chains such as Solana and Radix, the new consensus mechanism of the logic clock is still in the concept stage, so it will not be introduced.
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Ethereum: Hot Rollup
In the past two years, the Plasma plasma expansion plan, which has become very popular, has basically failed. At present, on Ethereum, the most likely to carry this banner is Rollup. This word has been named N times by V God recently. Many well-known Layer 2 projects have also announced that they will start Rollup.
To understand why Rollup is rising, you must first understand why Plasma failed.
And to know why Plasma failed, you first have to know why Ethereum is so slow.
The code is submitted to ETH through a transaction, forming a "smart contract". When this contract is executed (miners write it into a block), all nodes need to execute and verify this contract.
Obviously, with so many nodes in Ethereum, those nodes with poor performance and connection will inevitably slow down the running speed of the entire system. Furthermore, the entire blockchain is piled up with all calculations after the mainnet goes online, and any new nodes that join the network need to be synchronized from scratch and perform all these operations in full.
Furthermore, if users want to "retreat" from the side chain, they need to publish the entire history to the main chain. If any major event occurs, everyone retreats together, and the main chain will definitely be overloaded in an instant and collapse directly.
All in all, plasma brings more problems than it needs to solve, so it was directly abandoned last year, and the star of hope for succession is called Rollup.
The main method of Rollup is - execute many transactions off-chain and "bundle" them together. The "aggregated" group of transactions is then verified using "some method" that confirms that each transaction is properly signed by the owner, preventing any invalid or manipulated transactions. The main advantage over Plasma is that it does something similar to Plasma, but solves the problems of data availability and exit complexity brought about by Plasma.
The "certain method" mentioned above can be divided into zero-knowledge proof (SNARK) and a cryptoeconomic mechanism. The one using zero-knowledge is called Zk-Rollup, and the one using cryptoeconomic mechanism is called Optimistic Rollup. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, and it is estimated that it will depend on time to decide the outcome.
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Polkadot: The ultimate in sharding
Before talking about Polkadot, we must first talk about sharding.
Sharding was proposed in 2017, and it has been more than two years since the first shot was fired by Zilliqa in 2018.
For more than two years, there are many names you may be familiar with... However, none of these sharding projects has really made a major breakthrough until today.
It just verified the comment when sharding first became popular in 2018. As the strongest technical community in Ethereum, sharding has not yet been developed. Where do you have the courage?
With this design, different chains can transmit information to each other, and the final result is to achieve communication through a shared consensus layer. "
People always regard Cosmos and Polkadot as the two biggest cross-chain competitors, but strictly speaking, the two are really not on the same track.
The essence of Cosmos is to implement the IBC cross-chain protocol. From the perspective of the public chain platform itself, it is much simpler than Polkadot. Hub and zone are actually the difference in location. The operating principle is the same. The key is to use IBC to link.
From this perspective, Cosmos is closer to a real cross-chain project.
People always regard Cosmos and Polkadot as the two biggest cross-chain competitors, but strictly speaking, the two are really not on the same track.
The essence of Cosmos is to implement the IBC cross-chain protocol. From the perspective of the public chain platform itself, it is much simpler than Polkadot. Hub and zone are actually the difference in location. The operating principle is the same. The key is to use IBC to link.
From this perspective, Cosmos is closer to a real cross-chain project.
And Polkadot, more like a shard to the extreme, has become a smart contract platform with its own cross-chain. The real opponent of Polkadot is ETH2.0, and what I will talk about next-BSV.
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BSV: The Big Block You Misunderstood
When many people mentioned BSV, they thought of infinite expansion, and then gave the BSV with unlimited blocks a name - blockchain network disk.
This word has a slightly derogatory meaning. After all, in the impression of most people, isn’t the storage thing done by projects like IPFS? You are a smart contract public chain, why worry about it? Furthermore, didn't it mean that Bitcoin is not Turing-incomplete? What smart contract platform do you still have?
According to the definition of Turing machine, BSV is Turing complete. After recovering many opcodes banned by BTC, BSV can roughly achieve what ETH can achieve. Most functions also have an upper-level smart contract language similar to Solidity.
The reason why BSV’s smart contract platform is another paradigm is mainly due to the following two points:
1. Database and operating system, not CPU
This may be the most direct difference between BSV and public chains such as Ethereum and EOS.
For smart contract platforms such as Ethereum, after a contract is initiated, regardless of whether Layer 2 is involved, all nodes need to execute and verify the contract to ensure validity and consistency. The client initiates a transaction (related to a certain contract), which is essentially equivalent to triggering an action executed by the entire network. This style is more like using the blockchain as a CPU.
But BSV is not at all, its operation itself is not on the chain, only instructions (like a piece of script code or a program library) are stored on the chain in the form of "files". That is to say, when a user performs an operation on the chain, it actually only runs the required operation locally. Since other nodes do not care about the operation corresponding to the execution process being executed off the chain, they only go on the chain when meaningful results are produced. . This style is to use the blockchain as a database or an operating system.
You may be wondering, what kind of blockchain is this? No calculation takes place on the chain, and key operations are not performed synchronously by all nodes. Who will guarantee that this calculation is valid and legal? How is this different from a centralized database?
There is still a big difference, that is, operations and results are all on-chain, so when it needs to be verified, it can be verified by everyone at any time - simply put, it is an "on-demand verification" Way. If you question my off-chain calculation results because of interests, welcome to check! Both data and scripts are immutable on the chain. If you calculate it, I calculate it, and he calculates it, the results must be the same, no matter who calculates it. Those who need it and those who are interested can count it. It is not necessary for all nodes in the whole network to count together every time.
So according to this model, after the maintainers of a website on the blockchain modify some data or pages, except for this part of the data that is saved on the chain as a result, other miners and miners who don’t care about this part of the data on the website Users are basically indifferent.
2. Heap hardware, not only heap hash power, but also bandwidth, connectivity and storage
In BSV's view, the current Bitcoin mining model is deformed.
You know, for mining, node software and mining machines are two parts. At present, most mining pools invest much more in mining machines than servers. They may buy 200 million mining machines and run node software. It's a broken notebook. In other words, a lot of money is invested in hashing power and not in server costs. This kind is obviously aimed at the block rewards, and it doesn't care about the handling fee. But you must know that block rewards will basically be an embellishment in another ten or eight years, and the handling fee will be king at that time.
How to ensure that the handling fee is sufficient? One is that in addition to the above requirements for transfers, there are also transactions brought by a large number of applications. The second is that the block must be large enough to ensure that there are enough coins in a block for transactions, which is enough to pay the miners' fees.
