Addressing Block Times: Impacts on Widespread Adoption

A Revolution in Blockchain: Addressing Block Times and Widespread Adoption

A collective sigh of relief was heard with the invention of blockchain—here was a basis that could be used for a completely decentralized currency. Banks would not be in control of our hard-earned cash, and neither would central authorities have complete governance over it.

Then, along came Ethereum. Suddenly, not only could blockchains be used to facilitate transactions using decentralized currencies (for example, Bitcoin), we now had a framework for decentralized application development.

However, whether you’re a Bitcoin purist, an Ethereum diehard, or a big fan of Litecoin, there’s a glaring issue that’s the same for all—the time it takes for a block to be mined.

Blocks are one of the most fundamental concepts in a blockchain. When you send BTC, ETH, or any of the other blockchain-based currencies and tokens, your transaction is (hopefully) included in a block. Blocks are pretty much just chunks of transactions, and many blockchains use PoW (Proof of Work). They are also instrumental in determining the difficulty of mining. There is an interesting article here if you’re interested in statistics on block times and difficulty adjustments.

So, how long does it take for a block of transactions to be confirmed? The number varies:

• Bitcoin has a 10 minute block time
• Litecoin lowers that by a factor of 4 to 2.5 minutes
• Ethereum’s block time is between 10 to 20 seconds

What this means is at minimum your Bitcoin transaction will take 10 minutes to confirm once. Ethereum is much faster at approximately 16 seconds, however, this can be orders of magnitude higher due to various factors such as high transaction volumes during ICOs.

Now we’re getting to the real issue here—how can this compete with a centralized alternative? Visa boasts that it can handle over 24,000 transactions per second. Disregarding the issues it might cause, halving Ethereum’s block time wouldn’t even achieve this.

In the real world, waiting minutes for payments to confirm is a step backwards, especially while standing in a physical store. Likewise for merchants, who don’t want to let a customer leave until their payment has been received.

Here’s where DAGs come in.

DAGs, or Directed Acyclic Graphs, don’t rely on a single, continuously confirmed blockchain. Think of the standard blockchain like a single stick constantly added to and lengthened in a straight line—a DAG functions as a network of interlocking branches growing outwards in multiple directions. Transactions can be confirmed orders of magnitude faster while remaining decentralized, as each block only needs to confirm the previous transaction.

FANTOM is breaking down the barrier to widespread adoption that blockchains and their associated block times have created—the OPERA Chain should be able to facilitate more than 300,000 transactions a second. Transaction throughput and processing capacity will increase with more widespread usage. Where others have hit scalability issues, FANTOM will thrive.

Let that all sink in. We’re looking at the last piece of the puzzle and we are not far away.

https://medium.com/fantomfoundation/how-block-times-prevent-widespread-adoption-6ce0dbcf4df0