Limitations to current blockchain platforms.
Since 2008, when the crypto currency revolution began with Bitcoin, there has been a paradigm shift in the way we think about handling money. From cash distributed by a centralized system to decentralized peer-to-peer virtual currency. There has been emergence of several crypto currencies but bitcoin and Ethereum will be the focus of this discussion as they are the most widely used and well studied implementations of the blockchain technology to date.
One of the most critical limitations to these current blockchain platforms is latency between nodes; which causes delay in transactions and consequently high transaction fees. Bitcoin takes 10 minutes or longer to confirm transactions, achieving 7 transactions per second maximum throughput. Ethereum can process 10 or more transactions per second, with confirmation time approximately 10 times faster than those found on the bitcoin network. If the current throughput of theses blockchains is compared to traditional payment methods, it could be understood that latency is a great limitation to blockchain if it’s to meet real-life business needs.
Other limitations include: 1. Security; one of the biggest selling point of the blockchain technology is that they are difficult to hack. However, users often rely on the safe storage of their private keys by centralized exchanges, which, if compromised, can provide an attacker with access to their wallets, and by extension, their cryptocurrency.
Wasted resources; The electrical and by extension environmental impact of the bitcoin blockchain is considerably large. n fact, if you were to combine the amount of energy used to protect the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks, there would be enough to power the country of New Zealand for a year.
Size and bandwidth; the storage capacity required to maintain the blockchain local ledger is directly proportional to the number of blocks on the chain, thus leading to a risk of much higher centralization if the blockchain becomes so large that only a few nodes are able to process a block
Usability; bitcoin takes at least 10 minutes to confirm transactions and at the same time transfer fees are high making it inapplicable in making little day-to-day transactions like grocery shopping.
The Infinity project (HYCON) as the solution
The Infinity Project is aimed at solving the current limitations of existing crypto currencies. To make crypto currency to be widely adopted and integrated into the wider economy, the Infinity Project team began researching new technologies and algorithms that were more suitable for mass, real-world adoption.
The core goals of the Infinity Project include;
Identify actual market needs for a cryptocurrency;
Although many blockchain projects have gained mainstream attention and recognition recently, no cryptocurrency has penetrated digital commerce on a global scale. Cryptocurrency acceptance and adoption is currently limited to a very small group of online merchants and a handful of other services, making it infeasible to completely rely on Bitcoin or any other currently available cryptocurrency as the de facto digital currency of choice.Develop a cryptocurrency that is flexible; The underlying Infinity blockchain that HYCON built upon has been designed with an interchangeable, modular structure, which will facilitate the easy adoption and alteration of the underlying technology to suit specific needs.
Create user-centric blockchain platform; The Infinity Project seeks to provide a more straightforward and user-friendly platform, in addition to an intuitive wallet and exchange platform interface. Ultimately, our goal is to allow more people to harness the paradigm-shifting power of blockchain technology.
Develop an ecosystem that promotes sustainable innovation; One of the most important aspects considered during the development of the Infinity Project was how to help more people, businesses, governments, NGOs, etc., harness the power of blockchain technology
Investigate methods for a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange; An active area of research for the Infinity Project is giving users the ability to exchange different cryptocurrencies in a decentralized manner. Current exchanges rely on centralization to cheaply and quickly trade cryptocurrencies, however this centralization requires users to entrust their fiat and cryptocurrency holdings to the exchange. The centralization of user funds and information existing on exchanges today make keep making these companies targets of malicious attacks.
Through HYCON, multiple other cryptocurrencies will be tradable, and transaction fees will be distributed to the miners who protect the network. Atomic swaps will allow HYCON to be held in escrow pending the proof of payment of another cryptocurrency, and thus facilitate trustless P2P trading of HYCON and other cryptocurrencies.
HYCON
Hyper-connected coin, HYCON is a fast and secure cryptocurrency that makes use of the SPECTRE protocol to enable high transaction speeds while maintaining security. HYCON coin is one of the 3 phases of the Infinity Project which also includes the open-source Infinity Platform for customizable enterprise blockchain solutions, and a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange platform.
In contrast to the Nakamoto protocol used for consensus on the Bitcoin blockchain, HYCON implements a protocol called SPECTRE to maintain consensus. SPECTRE generalises a blockchain into the form of a directed acyclic graph(DAG) by employing a voting algorithm between pairs of blocks in order to specify their order in a pairwise manner.
THE TEAM
Conclusion
The vision of the Infinity Project is to provide a cryptocurrency ecosystem available for mass adoption. we have proposed a new cryptocurrency; "Hyper-connected Coin" (HYCON), which from its very beginnings, was designed to be fast, cheap, scalable, and safe through the combination of the SPECTRE protocol and BLAKE-2b hashing algorithm and thus ready for adoption and usage in a variety of real-world situations.
Useful links
Website: https://hycon.io
Whitepaper: https://hycon.io/doc/whitepaper1.2.2_en.pdf
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/teamHycon
Telegram: https://t.me/ teamhycon
Twitter: https://twitter.com/teamhycon
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/HYCON/
Steemit: https://steemit.com/@hycon