Blockchain Scalability: Current Challenges and Potential Solutions

Related: The Current State of the Bitcoin Network and Its Biggest Block The main off-chain scaling solution for Bitcoin is the Lightning Network, which could offer the exponential scaling required for Bitcoin to dramatically increase its throughput. Proof-of-work is great for Bitcoin, but we still need alternatives Bitcoin uses proof-of-work (PoW) to form consensus in the network.

Instead of creating more PoW blockchains, we should be focusing on developing other consensus mechanisms with different trade-offs in order to support different use cases, such as voting, social media, a machine-to-machine economy and supply chain provenance. Barton works on the structures of various types of decentralized consensus protocols, hashing and asymmetric encryption algorithms, and analysis and applications of new blockchain and crypto technologies such as Maid Safe, Iota and NXT.

Timeline of Bitcoin, Nxt