10,000 foot overview (remember from the eternal optimist and simplicity seeker
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Please critique and poke at this as viciously as anyone wishes, it’s for the good of us all
Cryptocurrencies have all followed the following pattern (blockchain or DAG currencies)
Corrolate a bunch of transacitons into a Block and then somehow agree on which block of transactions are the next block.
Because of that they then
Append the block to the chain/dag
There are many reasons for that, but I feel its follow the leader, BTC did it (for good reason, i.e. slow processing of a block).
SAFE took a different approach
SNT is also a DAG based framework. However each transaciton is a single transaciton and the `chain’ or proof of validity comes from the fact the transaciton was an output form a previous transaction. You can follow that all the way back to genesis. However following it back one transaciton in a network that is secure and decentralised (sybil resistant) is enough.
People will run audits on full transaciton history etc. and that is good. It should be no differnt to other currencies.
However, this is the interesting part. As each transaction depends on just the previous valid SNT then we just need to check that previous SNT (parent). This means we have something quite special (and arguably obvious).
SNT does not write to a chain/dag of transaction blocks, each transaction is its own block if you like, where the block is the current SNT and its parent.
In short, this means we parallelise transaction across the whole network. Each group can transact circa 20,000 transactions per second. In a network of say 1000 groups that is 20,000,000 transactions per second.
If group size ends up at 5 (which I feel it can) then that is a network of a few thousand nodes (groups are interlinked like a Venn diagram, so each node may belong to 5 or more other groups, depending on distance).
We need to measure, but a network of 5000 nodes could reach multi-million tps easily, but a network of 5000 nodes is likely a failure as we use small nodes. So networks of several millions is much more likely (where many folk run 1-200 nodes each). This can lift the network into billions of transactions per second and all happening in parallel.
This is what is exciting and, again, obvious, but it feels like this is how digital currencies should work. At minimum, it makes nano payments possible and could usher a completely new set of protocols and networks.