Too late?
When we tell people we’re building a Layer 1 Blockchain with a new type of consensus, they often question the timing. Hasn’t the industry already explored the consensus design space for 10 years? Haven’t many brilliant minds already saturated the space with every conceivable idea?
The Litheum team sees the scaling dilemna as an existential issue for the blockchain industry. Prior to 2017, the Bitcoin community talked openly about a global payment system and microtransactions.
The ambition of Web3
Although the industry is highly ambitious, and every new turn of the market seems to come with a new batch of exciting ideas, in our view there is still a lack of traction. We believe this lack of impact stems directly from the scale vs decentralization debate.
How can a chain be trusted for financial operation if it's not the most decentralize? But also how can a chain acheive anything if it runs at the speed of a computer built in 1955?
The Root of the Problem
The most trusted blockchains, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, are intentionally limited, and the community seems to understand in their guts, that this is true, that a chain that isn't restricted in scale, is less trustworthy.
But gut feelings, although great for founders, and not so great for engineering teams, at least not when you're trying to solve some fundamental, unsolve problem. A guy feeling might lead you in the right direction, but it can't solve your problem.
In order to solve this scaling issue, we need to first understand, in precise, cold, rigorous terms, why blockchains are intentionally limited.
Why blockchains are intentionally limited
The industry uses the name “Blockchain” because that’s all that most consensus designs decentralized, the database which maintains its consensus as a chain of blocks. But a Blockchain is not only a chain of blocks, building a consensus requires computational resources which are typically not paid for.
The Litheum team understands that a Blockchain is more than just a chain of blocks, that a blockchain, when viewed in it's entirety, is a network application.
True Decentralization - The First Principles of Decentralization
Consensus can be understood as a Nash Equilibrium, specifically a Win-Win, amongst actors which are otherwise in competition.
A blockchain, in this context, is created by a set of actors' collective actions, which are all incentivized in the actors' own best interests.
Critically though, those actions must do all the things a blockchain does! This is where most consensus designs miss the mark, although it may seem simple.
Most, we believe, have not considered whether this is possible, to incentivze every RPC, because they subconciously believe that it is not, because they have not considered the problem in detail, and also, critically, becuase they don't see the value of this approach.
However, the value of this approach, which we will discuss further in the future, is that it solves the scaling problem!
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We look forward to achieving True Decentralization together!
Clayton Rabenda Litheum
