Blockchain - State of PoCs

By now, this may be 100th time you are hearing the world ‘Blockchain’ within a week. Couple of Start-Ups from India have already caught attention of Consensys Labs Tachyon initiative which is investing big time into ‘Blockchain’ technologies. There are scores of others who are trying to build Proof-of-Concepts (PoC) across diverse domains. But among all these, there are still questions being raised on the scalability of Blockchain technologies.

Challenges with Current Blockchain Technologies

The biggest challenge with the current Blockchain technologies is transaction speed. You can say that this is the only reason for Blockchain technologies not going mainstream. But how much of these transaction speeds affect your plans? Is there a way out? Is it possible that you can continue working on PoCs without worrying about if you can take it mainstream?

Does transaction speeds affect your PoC?

Yes, if you are building a Dapp on the ‘Main Ethereum Network’ and if you plan to use ethers (Crypto currency of Ethereum) as part of your functionality. Transaction speeds depend on few factors like block size, block time, transaction traffic, transaction fees (Gas) etc.

“Ethereum has a block size limit due to the block gas limit enforced by the consensus protocol. The block gas limit is dynamically adjusted by miners. In each block, miners can increase or decrease the block size by a maximum of the previous block size divided by 1024.”

So, it is next to impossible for any changes to take place in the way currently blocks are added to Blockchain. Even if someone wants to change, there are other complications. There are efforts to find a way out. There is Lightning Network among others. So, if you are currently building a PoC on the main Ethereum chain than you should think it over.

Ethereum Private Consortium

If you have been working on PoCs around private Ethereum blockchain either on Azure Cloud (Azure provides templates to spin private consortium) or a in-house chain, then you are at least safe from transaction speeds. From scalability point-of-view, you can always add more nodes to your network and also deploy you Dapp based on your Peer network. In the sense, you can have multiple deployments of Dapp connecting to nearest Blockchain node and then redirect users accordingly.  The consensus logic, either Proof-of-Work or Proof-of-Stake, also doesn’t really affect your Dapp.

Ethereum Blockchain Vs Hyperledger

I have come across this argument multiple times. Also, there is argument on ‘Permissioned’ & ‘Permissionless’. If you building a Dapp on public Ethereum Blockchain then it is ‘Permissionless’ but if you are setting up your own private consortium then it is, in way a, ‘Permissioned’. You cannot really compare a Public Ethereum Blockchain to a Hyperledger. The only big difference between between a Hyperledger and a PRIVATE Ethereum Blockchain is that Hyperledger doesn’t have any provision for Crypto currency. Both of them differ on consensus mechanism and few other aspects. So, if you are building an enterprise Dapp then you have choice of using either Hyperledger or Private Ethereum Blockchain.

I have interests in Alexa, Angular / AngularJS, NodeJS, Ethereum Blockchain, ChatBOTS and many more. When not with technologies, sing & play guitar. Read more at http://www.dudistan.com/