Giant blockchain: the best features of Dash and Ethereum

giant-admin (33)in #bitcoin • 6 years ago (edited)

The Giant blockchain technology is a synthesis of the most advanced solutions invented by various coders across the world. This material describes how and why our team has decided to implement some useful elements of the major digital currency projects and about their current disadvantages.

Consensus algorithm

The blockchain of Giant can be basically described as a protocol with a network of nodes and its own unique system of contracts based on PoW (Proof-of-Work) and later — PoS (Proof-of-Stake) consensus algorithms. To be more precise, we are going to move to PoS in the next 9 months from the current PoW hashing algorithm called Quark. The upcoming PoS structure will resemble PIVX, with some elements taken directly from this cryptocurrency project. The Proof-of-Work algorithm ensures rewards for mining, whilst the Proof-of-Stakes puts first those who own more cryptocurrency units. Sometimes (but not in the case of Giant) these two approaches are merged together, for example, in Emercoin.

Which coins influenced us: DASH -> PIVX -> ALQO -> GIANT

Dash — a sophisticated variation of Bitcoin technology — has a useful technology of masternodes which was later repeated in PIVX and ALQO. Masternodes are computers which are being operated by the members of the cryptocurrency community and used to sustain the network. Usual nodes have less rights and perform simpler digital currency network tasks.

The network of masternodes allows community voting on the cryptocurrency development issues. The main similarity between Dash and Giant is that both projects have a decentralized governance by masternodes voting. Dash, PIVX, ALQO and GIant share two other interesting properties: InstantSend (in our wallet it’s called HyperSend) and optional anonymous transactions — PrivateSend. Unlike Monero hiding tools, PrivateSend can be activated solely by the choice of the user — masternodes can optionally mix the data and make transactions anonymous.

We have used the ALQO code base to make our own fork – as our blockchain engineers tell, they had to fix some legacy bugs at first. There was even a malicious attack during the initial phase of the project, but, of course, the Giant team has made sure the network remained intact. Unlike PIVX, ALQO had a better structure to rely upon.

Another major borrowing: the principle of unspent transaction output (UTXO) which is derived from Bitcoin. Thanks to UTXO, every transaction uses the outputs of the previous transactions and creates new outputs that would be used by the next similar operations. Every such output can only be used once. The information above that contrary to the title of the article, Dash and Ethereum were not the only digital currency projects we chose to research.

Smart contracts technology

Dash, Bitcoin and PIVX all use Bitcoin Script which, according to our experts on this topic, wasn’t designed to be used in a project focused on financial deals and settlements on the blockchain. This naturally made Giant developers to study Ethereum (ETH) — a newer and widely-known digital currency. The structure of Ethereum allows to use so-called smart contracts (sometimes also referred to as «Smart Contracts») which allow to digitally capture a mutual agreement between several parties. Despite this, the Giant team has found at least seven several obvious security disadvantages in the current Ethereum structure, and sometimes the restrictions imposed by ETH developers do not meet the needs of Giant.Exchange. For example, one of the security breaches of Ethereum has already led to the loss of $30M for the Parity client users. You can read more about the current disadvantages of Ethereum in our own dedicated article called JavaScript In The Code of Smart Contracts.

Because most Ethereum problems come from its smart contracts programming language Solidity, we have chosen JavaScript ES6 standard with a future potential update to ES7. Our blockchain technologists clarify that theoretically we could have used C# or C++, but both these languages are more complicated which would have slowed down the process of development — and this is unacceptable. In the future, the community will participate in the ongoing process of Giant smart contracts enhancement. It will be easier for them to work with Javascript and we will see more useful proposals in less time spent.

Unlike in Ethereum, the smart contracts of Giant will be updated and even destroyed in the Giant network. This would not bring any chaos to the system because the rules of the update and deletion are defined by the developer of the contract who is not interested in decreasing community reputation. Security will not be breached thanks to multisignature and date restrictions. The first defensive tool, sometimes also called multisig, requires several approvals from private key holders. The second tool allows to set a date after which the contract may be deleted. For instance, someone is holding a contest in the Giant blockchain which will expire in November 11, 2020. After this date, anyone may delete this contract. Furthermore, this function provides a solution for data overloads. Blockchain skeptics view the current systems too bulky — not least because of the amount of obsolete data which the customers will never use again. The deletion of irrelevant smart contracts will undoubtedly optimize the general database.

Comparative table

While researching all the above-mentioned cryptocurrencies and their technologies, Giant engineers have taken the best existing features of blockchain and continued to optimize them further. This comparative table summarizes all we have described and demonstrates the pros and cons of Bitcoin, Dash, PIVX, Ethereum and Giant. We have divided the key features of analyzed digital currencies into several groups:

Consensus, Algorithm, Block size, Block time and Max transactions speed define the core structure of the blockchain and its performance.
Script language, Script Turing completeness, Script core update and Smart contracts deletion characterize the language of internal scripts executed in the blockchain environment.
Max coin supply, Burning fees and Self-governance describe the critical economic factors of currencies — emission, transactions commission and how exactly these two are controlled by the community to fight inflation.

In addition, our formula for the speed of transactions looks as follows:

Speed = (max block transactions ) / (block time in seconds)

The max block transactions number is found by this formula:

(Max block size) / (average size of transactions in bytes)

All in all, you can see that the infrastructure of Giant easily outplays that of Bitcoin when it comes to the list of capabilities. While PIVX is better than Giant in some regards, our blockchain uses the network nodes resources more rationally. With all of the current achievements of the Ethereum team in mind, the scripts programming language of this digital currency has become infamous for security issues. In some cases, only a hard fork can fix the consequences of the hack. As we have already stressed above, there are more JavaScript programmers than Solidity experts which is a reason why the community of Giant coders may become large in the future. Users will be able to make Giant smart contracts even more reliable. The possibility to update and destroy smart contracts and the economic regulation tool called burning fees can be called two main advantages of Giant — not even Ethereum, currently the #1 smart contracts cryptocurrency in the media, can boast with these features. To be fair, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin has independently considered a similar mechanism of countering emission — burning tokens, yet this function is still not implemented at the time of writing. You will see more about why burning fees is beneficial in a separate material, while smart contracts are described in our White Paper. More on their nature and the ability to delete them can be found in our separate article regarding scalability.

With all of this information in mind, we can call the Giant blockchain a competitive structure with several exclusive advantages in comparison to close rivals.