Forcing cryptocurrencies to scale will always remain a very troublesome topic by the look of things. Bitcoin shows such issues can effectively cripple a network with relative ease. Project Terab, an open source initiative, wants to make sure Bitcoin Cash goes in a different direction. Right now, the network can accommodate blocks of up to 8MB in size. With Terab, the goal is to ensure one terabyte blocks become a possibility for the future. An interesting concept, but the bandwidth requirements shouldn’t be underestimated either.
Looking to the future is always important in the world of cryptocurrecy development. It is always better to prepare for potential issues rather than patch things up later on. The Bitcoin network has learned this lesson the hard way. After many years of bickering, the network now has a scaling solution few service providers are willing to use. Moreover, there is the Bitcoin Cash altcoin which seemingly has no scaling issues as of right now. Several initiatives are underway to further increase the BCH block size in the coming years.
Project Terab and one Terabyte Blocks
One of these scaling initiatives is known as project Terab. It’s an open source initiative focusing mainly on Bitcoin Cash‘s technical issues. More specifically, the team aims to introduce BCH blocks of one terabyte in the future. It is an astonishingly high number, but an interesting prospect nonetheless. Bringing such blocks to the network will be a rather big challenge, though. With such blocks, Terab would also allow Bitcoin Cash to process 7 million transactions per second.
It is evident these goals are very ambitious. Achieving such major milestones may not even be feasible in the long run. At the same time, in theory, nothing prevents a blockchain from scaling to such levels. The main problem is the terabyte blocks. Very few people have the infrastructure and bandwidth to process such blocks on a regular basis. Surprisingly, it seems unlikely such block sizes would be feasible for the regular Bitcoin blockchain. It seems the introduction of SegWit has made on-chain scaling a lot more difficult in terms of sheer block size increases.
Whether or not Terab will become a success, remains to be determined. The open source initiative certainly introduces some new opportunities and challenges. It will take a few years until such a block size could effectively be introduced to the network, though. Right now, the maximum size is 8MB, which isn’t even sued by most service providers and mining pools. Before we get to one terabyte, we need to experiment with 1 GB and 10 GB blocks. All of these developments are well worth keeping an eye on. It shows there are many ways to make bitcoin stronger and better in the future.