Steemit Crypto Academy S2Week7|| Blockchain Scalability and Possible Solutions|| submitted to @alphafx

It's another week in the Steemit Crypto Academy lectures and am glad to be your student @alphafx.

This week's discussion is on scalability, this has been one of the greatest problem with the blockchain technology and has drawn attention of many both researchers, etc.

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Introduction
In very simple terms Scalability is the ability of a project to change with respect to increasing size, the ability of the project to adapt with time and population change can be described as Scalability. In cryptocurrency, scalability can be referred to the limited capacity of that network to function effectively when faced with large transactions. As Cryptocurrency continues to increase the problem and need for a solution arises, more transactions are being pumped into the blockchain on a daily basis.

Why is Scalability a problem
There has been serious influx of transactions coming into the blockchain at a time, more transactions means more blocks need to be created, when a blockchain isnt scalable, there is bound to be serious queue which will then led to selection of transactions according to commission paid as transactions fees, the one with the higher commission get to be treated first before the ones with low commission or transactions fees. Bitcoin for example is able to take at least 6 transactions per second, if transactions are more than 6, there is bound to be queue. In the long run transactions with higher commissions will then be selected leaving the one with low transaction fees, however, system becomes very slow as it takes bitcoin 10 minutes to create a block.

What a the Problems introduced by Scalability
Such problems that could arise from issues on Scalability are:

1)Limitations
2)Block size
3)Higher fees
4)Transactions response time.

Binance Vs BTC
In other to fully accept a network it has to demonstrate its capability to absorb or accommodate numerous transactions, this lead to the BSC (Binance smart chain), most of us are using today, the bitcoin scalability issues lead to the Bsc creation.

(Doge in wallet)

Comparing the Bsc to BTC, requested approval exactly 11:25:10 am and Approval was given exactly 11:25:12am, we can easily say that BSC is more scalable than BTC. Bsc uses the Proof of Authority (POA) and has been described to be one of the fastest blockchain times and lowest fees structure. BTC and Etherum had failed in solving the problem of scalability, which has caused an increment in transaction (up to $100 worth of Etherum sometimes on a transaction. It is also worthy to note that Bsc is know for its high speed in confirming transactions and very low transaction fees (ranging from 0.01 - 0.5) for some transactions. This is the reason there has been infux of users joining Bsc community.

In the demonstration, I decide to send some doge from Binance to my trustwallet. The time of confirmation was just less than 5 seconds, which implies that the Bsc is quite fast and therefore scalable considering the influx of transactions. Unlike BTC that process only about 6 transactions per second, Bsc can process more than 10 times of that in seconds.

Tron vs BTC
TRON ahs been considered one of the very efficient and reliable blockchain networks within the cryptocurrency ecosystem and a platform for scalable blockchain technology accommodating 1000 Dapps.

Founded in 2017 by Justin tron with sole aim of correcting scalability issues encountered with Bitcoin, etc. It is capable of processing about 2000 transactions in seconds which is higher than that of bitcoin which is about 6TPS, even higher than Etherum and the Binance smart chain. Observations made when transferring trx to poloniex using tronlink wallet (a tron based wallet) shows great transaction speed and high scalability. Transactions was free and no charges incured.

The difference between the transaction and confirmation time was less than 30 seconds as shown in the screenshot below. This can helps us conclude that Tron blockchain is quite scalable far more than that of BTC.

Possible Solutions to Scalability
Having discovered an important problem that could affect the adoption of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies solutions are being discussed. From many solution we will discuss few such as:

a)Hard fork
b)Lightening network
c)Soft fork

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Hard fork involves a split of a coin into two, an example is the bitcoin cash split of Bitcoin itself. When a coin is being split into two, the block size is increased once the project was successful. Bitcoin cash our very food example was a successful Hard fork and this helped to increase the block size to 32MB, giving room for network opportunities.

Lightening network allows two participants to transfer and receive cryptocurrency several times without recording it on the root blockchain. These transactions are verified but are not recorded on the main ledger, I believe this would help lessen the load on the server and thereby make transactions fast and swift. It allows using double signed transactions to solve bitcoin scalability issues.

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As earlier stated it involve send and receiving funds between 2 individuals, in double signed transactions, the two individuals deposit a certain amount of cryptocurrency into mutisigned wallets which they can access with their private keys. This transactions continue between this two parties until the channel is closed and distribution is processed and data being sent to the main ledger. This could give room for over a billion transactions at a time.

Plasma Cash it has being described as an innovative approach to solving scalability problems. It was created by Vitalik Buterin the Etherum founder and the creator of Lightening network and act almost like the Lightening network. Plasma Cash acts as a new layer where platforms can build decentralized applications which are usually executed by smart contracts. It allows billions of decentralized applications to run on it thereby processing billions of transactions per seconds. By allowing these smart contracts excecutions, scalability problems can be solved.

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The added layer inturn allows transactions to be processed without necessarily overloading the network. Since it acts as a branch it send report to the root or main server to avoid faults on the server.

Other possible solutions are using Soft fork or SegWit, amongst others

Conclusion
The problems arising from scalability could pose a treat to Cryptocurrency adoption as there are influx of people getting in it meaning more transactions would be process on a daily basis and I also believe more research are currently being made to this effect.

Thank you.