BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY OVERTAKES VISA, WITH RED BELLY

[cryptency_v]

Blockchain proponents have long been claiming that digital currency has the potential to eclipse traditional finance methods and Thursday morning, it looked like their vision was one step closer to becoming reality.

Latest reports about blockchain research carried out at University of Sydney, show the technology’s performance improves as it progresses. New data from the University of Sydney’s Red Belly Blockchain research project have found that it can process financial transactions 50 times faster than originally thought, making it more rapid than Visa for worldwide payments!

Dr. Vincent Gramoli, head of the Concurrent Systems Research Group developing the blockchain, said: “Our latest tests showed the Red Belly Blockchain can process more than 660,000 transactions per second on 300 machines in a single data centre. This is a notable improvement from our tests earlier in the year, which showed our blockchain achieved a performance of more than 440,000 transactions per second on 100 machines.”

This is compared to Visa’s network, which can process 56,000 transactions per second. Bitcoin is limited to about seven per second whereas the ethereum blockchain can process twenty.

The latest news seem to be supporting the view held by cryptocurrency enthusiasts – that as blockchain technology is slowly perfected over time, it will become more safe and reliable and eventually overtake the role of traditional financial instruments.

The Red Belly Blockchain research project was conceived to find a solution to problems currently facing digital currencies such as double spending. It is different from proof-of-work (PoW) blockchains in that it offers a performance that scales without consuming much electricity. This in itself is an interesting development as lately the cryptocurrency community has been embroiled in a bitter civil war regarding the issue of mining of new cryptocurrency.

Initially envisioned as a completely decentralized and democratic process, mining was accessible to anyone with a slightly above-average home computer and a graphics card. As the blockchains expanded, the computational power required for further mining increased. This had the effect of slowly tipping the balance in favor of organizations that have whose size and capital allow them to invest into specialized mining equipment and can afford to feed this equipment with an unlimited supply of electricity.

Bitcoin Gold – the third and the latest fork of the original Bitcoin was intended to remedy this problem, by introducing improvements to the blockchain that would once again make it easier to mine cryptocurrency with a regular GPU. However no sooner than the morning of Bitcoin Gold’s scheduled release – their website came under a concerted denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

While Bitcoin Gold’s development team still has not figured out precisely the identity of the attackers, it has been established by now that the attack originated from hijacked computers with IP’s originating in mainland China. This is perhaps not a coincidence as China houses the majority (more than two thirds) of all the global mining operations. It is then perhaps logical that some of those operations did not look too kindly at Bitcoin Gold’s attempt to siphon at least some of the profitable activity away from their hands. The development of Red Belly potentially shifts the balance in favor of mining “democrats” by lowering the infrastructural requirements for mining.