EOS Will Scale Bitcoin
Discussion of Bitcoin’s future revolves around the viability of Lightning Network, the only scaling tech being built by BTC core devs and community. Supposedly, the future of Bitcoin’s viability relies entirely on Lightning and sidechain technology. However, I’ve said many times that few people understand that any blockchain can act as a scaling solution to another by allowing transactions to occur on a faster chain and anchoring its settlement to the root chain for security guarantees during disputes/fraud/attacks. This is, in a rough sense, how Lightning itself works.
Lightning Labs, one of the main companies behind the development of the lightning network has raised less than $3m according to Crunchbase. Blockstream which is supposed to be the behemoth leading the majority of BTC dev efforts has raised $101m. This is only about 10% of the EOS VC fund alone… Additionally, despite being in development much earlier than EOSIO, Lightning has 3,000 less commitments on GitHub vs EOSIO which is one of the most active blockchain repositories worldwide.
The EOS community has the technical expertise and Block.one has the resources to spur on research and development in new initiatives — such as BTC scalability. For example, if Block.one created even a small (relatively speaking) EOSBTC scalability fund, EOS could ironically be the most well funded, highest development activity, and promising BTC scaling technology overnight.
In fact, it already might be. Our team at Everipedia/IQ token is actively working on implementing an EOSBTC scalability solution. We’ve rebuilt the Bitcoin transaction structure and spending system as an EOSIO UTXO smart contract implementation. This allows anyone to spend BTC by signing transactions with their BTC private keys but on EOS. This step is actually complete thanks to Everipedia + Decentral Bank’s recent release of such a smart contract.
The only feature left to build at this point is trustlessly swapping BTC into the EOS mainnet UTXO contract and back into Bitcoin’s layer 1 blockchain in such a way to preserve BTC layer 1 security guarantees. Once that step is implemented EOS will, unexpectedly to most, be the best bet that Bitcoin has in the near to medium term at effortlessly increasing its throughput to thousands of transactions/s.
Admittedly, the final step of two way trustless BTC swap is difficult and could take months to build, but this post is meant to serve as a signal to the EOS community + greater crypto community to be aware of the unappreciated and unseen potential of EOSIO technology as it relates to BTC and other PoW digital assets that need layer 2 scalability solutions. Not only is the EOS mainnet a great solution to increasing throughput, it is also the most feature-rich scalability solution — after all, it’s literally a Turing-complete chain. If our team continues to make breakthroughs as we have in the first half of 2019, don’t be surprised to see billions of dollars worth of BTC transactions settled on the EOS mainnet in the coming months!
