Blockchain Trilemma - Crypto Academy / S5W2 - Homework post for nane15.
Hello fellow steemians!
Welcome to another week of the steemit Cryptoacademy season 5. Professor @nane15 has made a wonder lecture concerning Blockchain Trilemma. Below is my homework task for the second week.
Q1. EXPLAIN IN YOUR OWN WORDS WHAT THE BLOCKCHAIN TRILEMMA IS?
Like explained in the lecture, i will first of all tell us what trilemma is in my own understanding.
Now, A trilemma is something that have three options, where you choose only two among the three of them, you can't have all the three option ls at once. Having that in mind, lets dive into Blockchain Trilemma
WHAT IS BLOCKCHAIN TRILEMMA
Ethereum creator vitalik buterin who originates the blockchain trilemma and it said to consist of three different characters in which you can only choose two among them three. Thses is a big problem blockchain facing. You can't have thr three at once These features include÷
- SCALABILITY
- DECENTRALIZATION
- SECURITY
For instance, if you make use of scalability and decentrilaztion, security will not be invloved.
In blockchain trilemma, which consist of the above mentioned feature, you can only have 2 among 3 but not all. The blockchain trilemma is a fundamental problem of blockchain that every blockchain developer need to know. It's basically states that out of three properties, blockchain can only have two of them, like i stated earlier. How comes? And what is the consequences for existing blockchain like Ethereum and AOS.
Q2. IS THE BLOCKCHAIN TRILEMMA REALLY A TRILEMMA?
The blockchain is really a trilemma, as we can see, it has a triangle shape which consist of 3 option to choose two just as Trilemma does and also consist of 3 options like "Free capital mobility, Fix exchange rate snd monetary." While the blockchain trilemma consist of "decentralization, scability and security" whereby while making decision, you can only two among the three. It means inability to satisfy all three attributes. The bloclchain project can only he able to satisfy two attributes. You have to make a decision on which attribute you can astain from. Example of it is bitcoin, which is decentralized and secured but are not scalable. Another example of this is Ripple, which is secured and scalable but are npt decentralized.
Q3. DEFINE THE FOLLOWING CONCEPT IN YOUR OWN WORDS.
DECENTRALIZATION
SCALABILTY
BLOCKCHAIN SECURITY
Decentralization in blockchain Trilemma means that we dont want to have anybody that is able to censor any transaction on the blockchain and that implies that many different people needs to run the production software.
Decentralization system, to break it down, dont have anything to do with middle man. Transaction are carried out through peeer to peer method without any of institution like bank involved, which also makes it to the fast.
There are three agents include to make decentralization works, this agent are÷
Those who is perfoming the transaction which is the users, those whose work is to record all data or information and also verify it as well which is the Validators and then finally, those whose work is to vote and modify the code in progress, which are called the programmers
So with all this put together, this makes the blockchain to be decentralized and not involving any third party.
This is something that you stumble upon if you study the blockchain, but actually this is really misunderstood. So what does it mean? It is basically described as the ability of a system to increase it's output proportionally to it's input. Lets take for example, We eat some food so that is our input. We have more energy and we are able to produce more work, So that is our output. But the problem is that, this relationship doesn't hold for longtime, because if you keep eating at some point, it will make you sick and your output will stop increasing and it will even start to decrease. So humans are not really scalable but example of scalable system in real life are factories. So if you provide more workers and more raw materials to the factories, that will be able to produce more goods as output.
So blockchain scalability means, thr ability to handle more incoming transaction so the input will have more transaction and the output would be, How many transactions were processed in a reasonable amount of time.
In security, we want to make sure that the data of the blockchain is reliable. In particular, we dont want to be hacked, for example, if we have some ether on etheral, we dont want our ether to be stolen, either from our address or from a smart comtract.
Without security, malicious activities can disrupt the blockchain by manipulating transaction or performing famous exploit like the 51% attack. Of the data stored on a ledger can't be immutable and foreign actors can distrupt a system.
Q4. BASED ON YOUR KNOWLEDGE, EXPLAIN AT LEAST TWO VIALBLE SOLUTIONS TO THE CHALLENGES POSED IN THE BLOCKCHAIN TRILEMMA.
This is a major problem in the blockchain technology, everyone is trying to figure out how this problem can be solved.
Sharding÷ Sharding is the way in which you break up a large set of data. Fundamentally, take a sharded first approach and this is the first how we talk about 'Sharding" the data. One of the biggest problem we look into is, how much data any given node has to store. If we have lots of transactions per second, then we have Suddenly got lots of data that you need to store and if you have smaller transaction per second, you have less scalability. So how do we make sure that circle that square is circled. This is by looking at how you should shard data in a logical fashion for a non centralized system.
Elrond÷ Elrond solves the blockchain trilemma through it's innotive architecture, consisting of three main components which are
- Adaptive state sharding
- Secure proof of stake
- Arwen virtual machine
Elrond is not the first to actually conceptualize useimg shards as means of improving scalability but if 2.0 and harmony 1 are built on similar models, however adaptive state sharding more sophisticated than the other sharding models due to the separation of shards into three separate types which specialize a different state network and parallel processing to combine all three synergistical which allows for improve communication inside the shards. This means a thousands x improved scalability or ethereum measly 15 transaction per second.
Elrond currently supports 15 thousand transactions per second but due to the adaptive state sharding can indefinitely scale as demand increases, they have performed over 263 thousand transactions per second on their test limit. I believe elrond adaptive state sharding is the most impressive architecture feature.
CONCLUSION
Blockchain trilemma had been a problem to blockchain, its very hard and stressful, but with time, with the above mentioned solution. The problem will get to an end. All thanks to professor @nane15 for a well detailed lecture.