Million-user Dapps on Ethereum:an Introduction to Application-specific Sidechains__ethereum

The the viral Dapp on ethereum (although it decentralization is questionable as analyzed and described by our previous articles) was enough to bring the network to its knees.

The number of pending transactions reached all time highs and transaction fees also-reached absurd amounts, with one user Also (mistakenly) paying $11.000 in transaction fees. Pending Ethereum transactions since the 5TFH of December (All-time-high >30.000) | Gas prices requiring >40gwei to confirm

The need for scaling solutions are becoming more urgent every day, as transaction fees and the transaction backlog .

Devcon3 Highlighted some Potential scaling solutions that would is able to solve most NG issues. However, these are solutions (other than Uraiden) are in a and stage to are not mature for the main enough network. Others have proposed raising block gas limit (a change analogous to increasing block size in Bitcoin), but that has its OW N Disadvantages.

Meawhile, there is a clear demand for scaling solutions that work today, in order to handle the needs of Real-world decent Ralized applications without completely overwhelming ethereum the network. If something as trivial as cryptokitties can make ethereum unusable, how'll it handle something on the scale of Starcraf T with millions of users? "You are could run StarCraft on the blockchain." Those kinds of things are possible.  High level, security, and scalability allows all, various other things to is built on top. Ethereum is a secure base layer that doesn ' t have too many. Features-vitalik

This article ' s goal'll be to describe how scaling on ethereum can be achieved through application-specific Sidechains, W Hich can have a more customizable "rule-set" while at the same time maintaining the security of the Ethereum. Scaling through Sidechains What is a sidechain?

The term "Sidechains" was a described in paper "enabling Blockchain innovations with pegged Sidechains", circa 201 4 by Adam's Back et al. The paper describes "two-way pegged sidechains", a mechanism where by proving ' you had ' locked ' some coins that were p reviously in your posession, your were allowed to move some the other coins within a sidechain.

A misconsception here should to be clarified. Sidechains can increase scale but does not imply scalability. Sidechains are no better at providing scalability than the block size. What Sidechains bring is the ability to experiment. To is able to build networks this run on Different-and possibly better-scaling-technology. ¹

They enable innovation.

A sidechain is defined by a custom "Rule-set" and can being used to offload computations from another. Individual sidechains can follow different sets of rules from the mainchain, which means-they can optimize for application s that require extremely high speeds or heavy computation, while still relying on the mainchain for issues the H Ighest levels of security. source:https://blockgeeks.com/guides/blockchain-wiki/ application-specific sidechains

The rules that define a sidechain can imply adding privacy features, or even trading security & decentralization for M Ore throughput. There is a lot of room for experimenting here and what trade-offs should produce the optimal performance DS of the individual application.

Also, Data-driven applications, incentives differ from financial applications. It may is worth it for the attacker to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to 51% attack a financial blockchain and rever Se a payment, but it probably doesn ' t make sense for them a tweet on a reverse microblogging. Because of this, applications need to being able to choose more flexible threat and modeling for optimize. There is a huge need for unstoppable applications this are censorship-resistant, transparent and provide high performance .

With this in mind, the Twitter-style decentralized application running on a blockchain, adjustable security can enable hi Gher throughput while submitting ' checkpoints ' to the ' main-chain in order to declare the finality of the ' the ' data so far.

Now so we have described a way to scale dapps, what would the if an happen entity the much power gathered to a too Lly relaxed security model, and is able to control a sidechain? achieving independence through Hard-forks

In centralized communities such as a subreddit, sometimes a toxic moderator to place, gets starts censoring ACC Ording to He agenda, and eventually tears that community apart.

In multiplayer games such as world of Warcraft, sometimes a massive change is implemented against community consensus, Lea Ving Tsun option for users to Protest-they ' re forced to either accept it or quit the game. Even Vitalik Buterin is horrified by this events! "I happily played world of Warcraft during 2007–2010, but one day blizzard removed the damage component in my beloved WA Rlock ' s Siphon life spell. I cried myself to sleep, and on "I realized what horrors centralized services can bring." I soon decided to quit. " Coordinated communities need to is able to pave away from situations they-believe not are and move on fair S-they all agree on.

They key to achieving this is sidechain hard forks.

Being as laconic as possible, a fork is a protocol upgrade. A high-quality comparison between forks can be found on Vitalik ' s blog. Fork variations Venn diagram, taken from vitalik.ca/general/2017/03/14/forks_and_markets.html a hard Fork is a permanent Divergence from the previous version of the blockchain. Nodes running previous versions'll no longer is accepted by the newest version. ¹ How does your achieve independence that way?

In the occurence of the this is against community consensus, the community are able to fork away, taking the state of The sidechain until before the dispute with it.  A proposed change this does not match community consensus can is ignored, and the community can keep on working on the old Chain.

There are many questions that would arise in-case such as, in a game for example:what if the majority of the leading "Malicious" devs decide to stay into the old chain? Would the new chain become stagnant of development, or would the developers compromise and adapt?

We don't have all the answers, but we believe the free market would figure these things out and best practices would emerge As more types of self-governing applications are created. At least, the community has a choice.

Loom network is aiming to being a platform where communities can run their software on Sidechains where they all have a veste D interest in the platform being provably fair and transparent while being able to adjust their security restrictions on D Emand.

Communities'll be able to run on a blockchain where users can spin up their own nodes and secure the network. These could are communities like Steemit, subreddits, forums, Facebook groups, Stackoverflow-type Q&a sites-places Ere people talk about a common interest-as as MMO games where everyone has a interest in the game remaining. The moment there is a divergence from the community consensus, the users must being able to fork.

When developers are finally able to create this types of platforms just as easily as they build today ' s modern WEB 2.0 AP Plications, that time would be is when the blockchain revolution would truly have begun.

Original: https://medium.com/loom-network/ Million-user-dapps-on-ethereum-an-introduction-to-application-specific-sidechains-c0fdc288c5e5