Meet “GoChain”: a blockchain with next generation speed and efficiency

Technology always improves on a constant basis

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Every single time there is a new breakthrough when it comes to technological innovations, it is just a matter of time for a better version to be developed and released into the market. We are capable of analyzing any single tool we have at our disposition, and figure out a way to improve it so it can serve on a more sophisticated way the current needs of the people using it.

It is a nonstop dynamic and a fierce competition between the entities developing these tools to earn their share of the market, and the people with the most benefits are of course the consumers who enjoy having access to better products as time goes by.

A perfect example of this is how the smartphones evolve in a matter of months, often even doubling the performance they offered in the previous model, but it is not just hardware products because the same can be said about financial services offered in the internet, we have seen how the number of options for making online payments has gotten broader and broader over the years, and cryptocurrencies is the technology with the most potential to disrupt this particular industry.

However, in the case of big changes such as the case with blockchain projects, it is never easy to create the best possible version without first going through a period of experimentation, and as of now, that is exactly where we are with this technology. Different and well known projects, each one of them developing what they think is the best approach and the one that could give the best results, but it is inevitable for there to be some problems, as well as ways to improve that are yet to be explored.

There are major deficiencies in the blockchain industry

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Managing transactions in a decentralized matter clearly has its benefits, which is why we have seen such a huge adoption of this technology, with people all over the world buying their first cryptocurriencies and learning how to use them, and what makes them unique.

But as this technology has become more popular and more used, it is clear there are several extremely important weak points that must be resolved in order for the blockchain takeover to really take place. Specifically, energy consumption, transaction speed and proper decentralization in the mining activities are factors that need to improve for the health of the industry.

Energy consumption

For anyone involved in this industry, it will be no surprise to read that bitcoin is capable of consuming more energy than small countries, there is a recent report about this fact in which it was indicated that “The Bitcoin network can be estimated to consume at least 2.55 gigawatts of electricity currently, and potentially 7.67 gigawatts in the future, making it comparable with countries such as Ireland (3.1 gigawatts) and Austria (8.2 gigawatts)”. | ^Source

It is clear that there must be a more efficient use of energy for blockchain projects to succeed in the long term. Consuming so much energy doesn’t sound sustainable, and projects that have a smarter and more sophisticated approach regarding this, should eventually become the new leaders and the most used platforms.

Transaction speed

These platforms need to be capable of handling an increasing number of transactions without any sort of complication whatsoever, and so far there has been cases where Ethereum for example, couldn’t handle everything that was happening in its network simply because of the amount of people participating in the video game called CryptoKitties ^Source, this happened due to the fact that Ethereum can only have 13 transactions per second, and if that number is exceeded then the entire platform starts to slow down.

Limitations like this one are certainly a big problem because it makes it much more complicate to have a proper adoption when there is not enough capacity to handle a high number of transactions without losing speed.

Proper decentralization in the mining activities

Mining activities has gotten very profitable with the price increase in the blockchain industry, a lot of money is invested in what is called “mining farms” and this trend will not slow down at all. There is clearly a risk that a single entity, or at least a small group of them, can end up controlling the majority of the mining activities of a blockchain project, essentially controlling that blockchain itself, for example, “4 companies in China account for 70-80% of all the mining activity for all the major coins/tokens including Ethereum”. | ^Source

Therefore, achieving a proper decentralization might be more challenging than what was originally thought.

How does GoChain plan to solve these issues?

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GoChain is implementing a new way to guarantee decentralization, they will analyze and pick 50 companies in 50 different countries, and they will be the ones able to sign transactions, as a way of discouraging any potential wrongdoing from these entities, their information will be completely public, so acting responsible will always be the best choice for them and their stakeholders, this is called Proof of Reputation and it is the consensus algorithm adopted by GoChain to solve the decentralization issue.

And since there will be a fixed number of block signers, the amount of energy consumed by this project will be
considerable lower, making it much more energy efficient.

Having a good market share is something very difficult in an industry so competitive such as this one, GoChain’s accepts any code running in the Ethereum network without having to change or adapt anything. This can be of huge help for developing teams that are having difficulties because of the 13 transactions per second limit on Ethereum, in GoChain the current limit is 1300 transactions per second which gives a lot more room for usage to take place without slowing down the network.

This will of course, allow for more innovative teams to deploy their creations without being worried if the network would be able to handle them or not, besides, since GoChain has transactions fees that are much lower than Ethereum’s (it can be at least 7,500x cheaper, and might even go as lower as 15,000 and 30,000 times cheaper ^Source), using GoChain will be less costly for the general public.

There is also another interesting feature with GoChain regarding their smart contracts, unlike Ethereum, GoChain will allow for the code running the smart contracts to be changed and adapted based on things that happened after the smart contract was deployed, in the real world contracts are changed on a constant basis, terms and condition can change, and new clauses can be added. GoChain will allow for the equivalent of those changes to be implemented in its network, and this will obviously increase GoChain’s attractiveness especially for those entities that need to handle several contracts simultaneously and updating them as time goes by, due to the fact that the versatility and the amount of possible maneuvers that can be done will be higher as a result, this is extremely important because companies with complex operations could leverage this blockchain platform for their activities, potentially triggering a new adoption wave, only this time it would come from big entities in need of fast transactions and improved smart contract capabilities.

Summary

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Blockchain technology is meant to take every major industry there is, it offers a safer way to register transactions and its corresponding information. But since we are still in the early stages, there are some issues that need to be solved first. Mainly the high energy consumption, and the low transaction speed currently present in the leaders of the industry.

GoChain offers a solution for those issues, by implementing a new consensus algorithm called Proof of Reputation, in which only selected companies will be able to sign the blocks of information produced by this network. They will be accountable for any mistake that might happen because their information will be public.

In order to easy off the process of deploying code in another network, developers currently using Ethereum will be able to start using GoChain right away without the need to change a single line of code, and just as that they can even start enjoying the benefits of GoChain over Ethereum like the faster transaction speed (currently 100 times faster) and the lower transaction fee.