Smartbridge vs. Atomic Swaps
“The race for scalability” has probably been the biggest part of cryptocurrency’s history. With Bitcoin originally only being able to process seven transactions per second (Western Union Alone does about 742), it was no surprise when Ethereum gained massive support this year. Etherium’s “Smart Contract” set up is indeed MUCH faster than Bitcoin.
http://www.trustnodes.com/2017/09/06/scalability-race-heats-ethereums-raiden-enters-testing-stage
I mentioned an idea that I had last night regarding a coin oligarchy that could potentially solve the scalability problem. So, I began to research. There seem to be two snippets of code that are gaining momentum.
https://my2btcents.tumblr.com/post/165609699876/frustration-its-strange-i-can-sit-and
Atomic Swaps will allow swaps between blockchains and it works! However, it requires the coins to be agreed upon at the time of the exchange. So, if user A decides to send you Bitcoin for Ethereum, user B cannot later decide to receive it in a different coin. While it is an AWESOME move in the right direction, it is of limited use and requires a lot to actually implement.
https://themerkle.com/what-is-an-atomic-swap/
The Smartbridge requires that ANY coin that uses it will have to add the snippet to be able to swap, and do it fee free. However, it also requires an intermediary known as Ark. This very much centralizes any currencies involved which is so Anti-Crypto I don’t know where to start. This is awesome because you could send me Bitcoin, and I could receive it in Ethereum. However, at the time this article is written, it is not operational.
https://blog.ark.io/what-is-the-ark-smartbridge-and-how-does-it-work-1dd7fb1e17a0
Another downside to both is that any coin wishing to adopt either snippet will be forced to hard fork their currency and that is dangerous for new currencies especially. Of course, being able to use the power of multiply block chains will increase the value of all coins involved, which is awesome.
We really should make a decision and add this sort of functionality as a standard measure to all currencies as quickly as possible if we want to move completely away from archaic monetary models and currencies, and that is the best thing we as a race could do. That’s My2BTCents.
I'm a huge fan of ARK so +1 on that....
But I'm confused by your Atomic Swap comment. I literally thought the point of the atomic swap was to be able to switch coins.
Literally Charlie Lee has been tweeting this week about all the swaps he did:
-LTC & VTC
-LTC & DCR
-LTC & BTC
What am I missing here? Help me learn this because now I'm confused lol.
Ok, I'm glad you brought that up as my language is obviously unclear. I'll go back and edit that to better clarify. What I meant to say was, the coins must be agreed upon at the time of exchange. In other words, you couldn't just decide to receive all bitcoin incoming transactions as Ethereum. You would be deciding to swap for one coin or another at the time of the exchange with the sender. Where as in ARK you can actually decide independent of the sender which coin you would like to receive. I can see where I was unclear, and I will go back and restate that the way I meant it to sound : ).
Also, on that topic, I would like to add that any currency forked from the Bitcoin codebase will be able to adopt Atomic swaps very easily, while currencies not forked from the Bitcoin codebase will require a lot more to adopt this functionality. So, it's not too terribly far off to assume that transactions like BTC > ETH might never happen to begin with.
Ahhh ok. cool I get it now!
And thanks for the post because I've never heard of smartbridge before now.