Scalability, Micropayments, Throughput & Speed
For cryptocurrencies used as daily digital payments, processing speed and scalability are critical components of protocol design.
How fast can a payment be made, and how many users can a network handle simultaneously, before it becomes too slow?
This "blockchain trilemma" is a term defined by Vitalik Buterin that addresses a problem with all blockchain developments to date, which is that decentralization, security, and scalability cannot be simultaneously optimized.
While most cryptocurrencies try to achieve better scaling either by low decentralization (e.g. Solana), using second layers (e.g. Bitcoin Core) or sharding (e.g. Cardano), EPIC Cash can achieve high scaling already in the base layer without compromising decentralization or security.
With a second layer, such as the Lightning Network on Bitcoin Core, transactions are executed outside the blockchain and thus no longer offer the same security as transactions on the blockchain itself.
A split blockchain as with sharding has the disadvantage that not all parts of the blockchain are stored on all nodes at the same time, which in turn leads to increased centralization.
The high scalability, security and decentralization of EPIC Cash is made possible by the breakthrough Mimblewimble protocol, an essential component of which is a technique known as Cut-Through.
This is a compression process in which redundant data, including data that is unnecessary for security, are constantly removed from the blockchain.
Over time, as more transactions are executed on the blockchain, cut through both increases privacy while reducing blockchain size. The network becomes more secure and cheaper to operate as more people use it.
For example, for the same volume of transactions, the EPIC blockchain would occupy only about 10% of the storage space required by the BTC blockchain, which translates into both lower computational requirements for processing transactions and, as a result, significantly higher throughput.
In its current state, with a block size of 1 MB and a block time of 60 seconds, EPIC executes 17 transactions per second, about three times that of Bitcoin Core, which currently runs at less than 5 transactions per second. But in Epic, over time, block size increases while block time is reduced.
At the Singularity in June 2028 (the point at which the issued coins of EPIC and BTC reach the same number and at which the emission curves of EPIC and BTC continue identically), the block size will be 128 MB and the block time 10 seconds.
This allows 12,800 transactions/second, which corresponds to 1.1B transactions per day, equivalent to today's volume activity of WeChat Pay in China.
By comparison, the world's leading digital payments provider, VISA, states that it processes an average of 150 million transactions per day.
The possibility of these high transaction numbers always guarantees consistently low fees, even with very high transaction volumes.
A block time of 60 seconds (further decreasing down to 10 seconds), together with the low fees, provides all the conditions for micropayments.
These are smaller transactions, usually less than a dollar, that can be used for a wide variety of things, such as paying for reading online articles, online tips, in-game purchases, etc.
A graphical comparison of the throughput of EPIC, XMR, BTC and ETH clearly shows the superiority of EPIC.
While fees for transactions on the Bitcoin Core blockchain can range from $2 to $81 depending on transaction volume, EPIC's fees are in the range of fractions of a cent, even with very high transaction volumes.
A short processing and confirmation time for transactions is particularly necessary for payments in everyday life. Assuming at least three blocks for a secure confirmation of a transaction, 3 minutes are required for this with EPIC in its current state. At Singularity in June 2028, confirmation will be achieved in just 30 seconds.
Comparing the processing times of a fully irreversible EPIC payment with a preliminary and always reversible credit card payment, card payments are usually made in a shorter time, but the actual crediting takes several days, the costs of 3% - 10+% are significantly higher, paid by the seller alone.
In addition, the seller bears the risk that even after 6 months, credited amounts can be charged back.
EPIC, based on the unique Mimblewimble 2.0 protocol, is the only cryptocurrency to combine the DNA of Bitcoin, conceived by Satoshi Nakamoto, with state-of-the-art blockchain technology.
An unprecedented combination of high scalability, security and decentralization, make $EPIC the perfect decentralized cryptocurrency with a use case to be currency for daily use.
For more information, please visit www.epiccash.com.
To buy Epic Cash: BuyEpicCash.com