In ten years we will not have block chains

Will Murphy is the vice president of blockchain at Talla.com, the company behind Botchain, a chain of blocks for the management of autonomous intelligent agents. What you read below are his words about the position expressed in the title of this article.

I predict that in 10 years blockchain technology will improve to a level that calling it "blockchain" will no longer be a useful term.

Let's think about this for a moment. Why do we call it blockchain? The three most interesting parts of the block chain are:

Consensus mechanisms
Management mechanisms (goal consensus on how to manage future improvements in the global chain)
The structure of the blockchain itself
The latter will affect how big the network can get, how fast transaction times happen, and so on. And the structure of the block chain is the reason why we call it "blockchain".

So, what do we mean by "blockchain"? We are going to divide the two component terms:

Block: a group of grouped transactions.

Chain: The blocks connected cryptographically linearly.

Goodbye blocks

I think that in the future the block will not be necessary. Instead, there will be a system in which transactions will be linked together and can confirm previous transactions.

To send your next transaction, you need to validate others in the queue. To get what you want (your transaction sent), you must do work for others.

Why do it this way? The transaction times in this model would be faster than, for example, the Bitcoin transaction times at present. The miner is technically eliminated and each transaction validates past transactions. Transaction times may actually decrease as more people use the system.

Ciao to chains

I also believe that in the future, the chain will not be a single block directional chain. I think it will look more like a mesh (or graphic). Maybe we could have a non-linear set of branches that go in different directions, where many parallel transactions are taking place.

So, maybe we'll call it a transaction chart. I have also seen the term Tangle (in the IOTA protocol) for similar early concepts.

Maybe we call it "the graph" in the same way we talk about "the cloud" today. We will all save information and transactions in this global chart (whether we know it or not).

DAG income

The closest thing I've seen so far that matches my imagined trajectory is a directed acyclic graphic.

From Wikipedia:

"In mathematics and computer science, a directed acyclic graph is a finite graph with no directional cycles."

A DAG model works differently than a chain of blocks. A common block chain requires miners to maintain blocks, but a DAG would not need any work tests or blocks.

New management models would be needed. So, there is a lot of work to be done.

But this model theoretically improves as new nodes are added. Therefore, it can be an improved model for both rates (or, in the Ethereum language, "gas") and scalability over current blockchain models.

In the future, we can have something that does what a chain of blocks does, only better. There are still challenges for this model, so I do not know how it will develop. But, I think this design is intriguing, and I'm curious to see how it develops.