BlockReduce: Scaling Blockchain to Human Commerce
This addresses the scalability issue for blockchain users and developers, offering a novel approach that could enhance utility for human commerce.
The paper tackles the scalability problem in blockchains, which leads to high costs and slow confirmation times, by proposing BlockReduce, a new structure that segments only consistency to achieve tens of thousands of transactions per second without compromising fault tolerance or decentralization.
Blockchains have shown great promise as peer-to-peer digital currency systems over the past 10 years. However, with increased popularity, the demand for processing transactions has also grown leading to increased costs, confirmation times, and limited blockchain utility. There have been a number of proposals on how to scale blockchains, such as Plasma, Polkadot, Elastico, RapidChain, Bitcoin-NG, and OmniLedger. These solutions all propose the segmentation of every function of a blockchain, namely consensus, permanent data storage, transaction processing, and consistency, which significantly increases the complexity and difficulty of implementation. BlockReduce is a new blockchain structure which only segments consistency, allowing it to scale to handle tens of thousands of transactions per second without impacting fault tolerance or decentralization. Moreover, BlockReduce will significantly decrease node bandwidth requirements and network latency through incentives while simultaneously minimizing other resource demands in order to prevent centralization of nodes.