Daniel Larimer, EOS and infinite scalability
In a recent tweet, Daniel Larimer, CTO of Block.one, the company behind the development of EOSio and the EOS blockchain, shared his idea about an alternative system to increase scalability and make transactions private.
Checkout my latest blog post talking about the potential of creating infinitely scalable and completely private digital cash and the open source release of a proof of concept implementation. It can be leveraged by #EOS, #BTC, and just about any chain. https://t.co/Q9RiPIAi6F
– Daniel Larimer (@bytemaster7) January 7, 2021
The Scalability of Bitcoin
In the post, Larimer starts from a problem intrinsic to any blockchain technology, namely scalability, which is the parameter that allows for more transactions to be processed per second.
Larimer looks at bitcoin and the possibility of dividing it into many satoshi, something that is only feasible in theory but that the fees make impossible. If we wanted to move Immediate Edge units of satoshi between one address and another, it would cost more in fees than anything else, making it effectively indivisible in satoshi.
Larimer’s idea for greater scalability
So here’s Larimer’s solution: transfer ownership of the private key by passing on the entire amount contained in it without paying a fee in the process. For example, if we were to transfer 2,000 satoshi to a person, we could give him the private key of the address.
To do this, Larimer envisages using a hardware system that allows for a separate environment that is inaccessible from the outside. This environment could only be used by a specific user.
Take, for example, Apple’s password protection system that we find on its devices. This is a secure environment that only the user could access through passwords and/or biometric solutions.
In the case of the blockchain, the process would involve inserting the private key into this secure environment, encrypting it and sending it to the sender.
Afterwards, third-party applications would verify that the private key has been deleted by the sender and that only the recipient is in possession of it.
Obviously, Larimer takes into account that this system is not perfect and that with advanced tools, such a private key could be extracted, but we are still talking about extreme cases and do not represent the norm for users. So, at macro level, whoever sends and receives the private key would have no idea and no way of recovering it.
Mojey already exists
This could certainly be an interesting idea, if it weren’t for the fact that a similar solution already exists and is called Mojey (open code and available to all). It is a system that uses the transfer of tokens via Bluetooth and via messages, and in addition does not require an Internet connection. Among other things, it uses the very system developed by Apple with the Whitebox crypto.
However, it should be noted that by using Mojey, the possibility of backing up the private key is lost, so in the unfortunate event that the system fails, there is no way to recover the crypto inside.
However, the advantage of this system is that it eliminates the cost of transactions, since it is on par with a message or file sent virtually instantaneously and without limits.
Finally, we know that Larimer himself is working on something like this and is very excited to reveal it.
Block.one is in fact working on an ‚offchain‘ system for transferring the private key to which an ‚onchain‘ address containing one or more tokens is linked.
Knowing, among other things, that Block.one has invested in a Bitcoin mining company and Block.one itself owns hundreds of thousands of BTC, these onchain addresses will most likely contain BTC.