Bitcoin Global News (BGN)
December 18, 2018 -- ADVFN Crypto NewsWire -- During this bear
market, growth persists. Prices may not be reaching to the moon
but, in a way, technical achievements are. As mentioned in other
pieces, this relates back to prioritizing building over trading and
holding assets in the crypto space.
Essentially, only the continued
work and growth of the blockchain development community will push
us forward. Today, Michael Casey penned a piece for CoinDesk on
this topic, in which he had one major conclusion to bring to
light.
To kick things off, most of us will
likely agree with Casey that we need a change of perspective in the
entire blockchain industry. We cannot continue to grow with the
overarching worldview that everything is either drastically
positive or drastically negative. Just one look at a unique scale
like the Fear & Greed Index from Alternative.me shows how much
these emotions can affect a space. At least in a general sense,
when any financial market is new, its’ price movements are
historically more affected by investors’ emotional responses to
extreme events.
In this sense, one could conclude
that the crypto market is analogous to an early version of the
stock market. Both are affected by these things and yet the stock
market has been around for much longer and is therefore, more
resilient to events that are not actually catastrophic.
With this in mind, we can logically
return to the biggest issue that Casey thinks is truly holding the
industry back. According to him, this may be understood as
achieving the ideal balance between decentralization and high
performance in a blockchain network? As he suggests, Ethereum and
Bitcoin are the top two examples of networks that urgently need to
solve this, especially since they are its’ top assets
historically.
In other words, if they cannot
scale more soon, then how will the less powerful assets follow
suit? In answer to this, Casey reminds us of the work that
continues to be done on “Layer Two” solutions, with the Lightning
Network rising to the front of the pack. To recap, the significance
of the Lightning Network is that it appears to solve the problem of
scaling Bitcoin for widespread usage. Without it, the network is
primarily built for large, instead of everyday
transactions.
Since its’ 2015 inception, the
network has grown to 4,400 full users and 13,500 individual payment
channels, which Casey points out have increased this month by
10.45% and 43.5%. Therefore, with these numbers in mind, technical
growth is persisting through the current bear market.
Lending major credence to this idea
is the work being done on the Ethereum network. While Bitcoin is
mainly focusing on scaling on the second layer, Ethereum is doing
so on both layers, with the Raiden network standing as its’
equivalent to the Lightning Network, while sharding exists as its’
major undertaking on the first layer.
If you are not familiar with
sharding, just think about the fact that both Bitcoin and Ethereum
are not anywhere close to the transaction processing ability of our
major legacy payment networks like Visa. Generally, Sharding
proposes that by separating nodes into workgroups instead of one
whole group, a blockchain will become much more
efficient.
When all of this is fully
implemented, we will see if it works as it should with both of
crypto’s leading networks. In the end, as mentioned above, what is
most important for now is for us to remember that the blockchain
industry is moving forward, with and without price-related
gains.
By: BGN Editorial Staff