| Take it from someone who has been studying distributed systems while architecting his own for a year — https://intercoin.org You can have both. The SAFE network uses Kademlia to select a group of computers based on a content address. It achieves security by not allowing computers to set their own IDs in the system but having them be kicked around sections from time to time. The XRP consensus algorithm is essentially what you would want when implementing crypto currency. It is also pretty good for storing files. The trick to scalability is always one thing: horizontal partitioning, also known as sharding. As long as you can partition your data, you can scale up the wazoo. The tough part with crypto-currencies is verifying the history because coins can mix, whether it’s UTXOs or account based systems. So the coin you hold may be the product of transactions among millions of other coins. So I think the only way to really do sharding is to emulate how cash has $100, $20, $10 etc. in other words have tokens that never get subdivided but only exchanged in an operation to “get change”. Instead of subdividing tokens, you first check with a given address whether it has enough change, borrow the change, do the transaction, and then the recipient will send the change back to that address and get back a larger denomination. All this happens behind the scenes but reduces the growth of UTXOs which is a huge problem for Bitcoin and others. What I talked about here is a FULLY distributed system, that is nevertheless super fast. |