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Vitalik Buterin believes Bitcoin Cash could be the ideal existing blockchain to serve as a data layer for Ethereum.
Ethereum, along with other blockchain platforms, has notoriously suffered from scalability problems, with a chain that can process about 15-20 transactions per second. In a blog post published on Friday, the Ethereum co-founder lays out the case for utilizing the Bitcoin Cash chain – at least temporarily – to help solve the problem.
Says Buterin,
“In the longer term (1+ year out) the scalable data layer is going to be Ethereum 2.0, because its planned 10 MB/sec data throughput is much higher than that of any existing blockchain. In the shorter term, however, we can start working on these techniques immediately by using existing blockchains, particularly those that have lower transaction fees per byte than Ethereum, as the data layer. Bitcoin Cash arguably fits the bill perfectly for a few reasons.”
Those reasons include high data throughput (about 53.33 kilobytes per second compared to Ethereum’s 8 kb per second); very low fees; and the existing machinery Ethereum has in place to verify Bitcoin Cash blocks.
Buterin also says the BCH community seems to be “friendly to people using their chain for whatever they want as long as they pay the tx fees.”
He does note that there are some negatives to Bitcoin Cash, however.
“The main weakness of the BCH chain is its 10-minute block time. This seems unlikely to change unfortunately. However, there is active interest in the BCH community on strengthening zero-confirmation payments using techniques like Avalanche pre-consensus 41. If these techniques become robust for the use case of preventing double-spends, we could piggyback off of them to achieve shorter finality times.”
Buterin adds that another alternative could be using the Ethereum Classic chain, which has a much faster block time (14 seconds) but lower scalability (approximately 8 kb per second).
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