At a recent Forbes Global Tech Forum held in China, Lei Chen, CEO of Xunlei, pointed out what milestones blockchain still needs to achieve for it to go mainstream. Here list includes:
Xunlei’s blockchain technology hopes to achieve all these milestones. Called ThunderChain, she believes the million transactions per second speed is doable by harnessing unused processing power from idling computers connected to the Internet.
The second milestone is a bit harder. As witnessed by the proliferation of cryptocurrencies after the launch of Bitcoin, it appears that blockchain is another Wild West Internet creation with no specific regulatory body of oversight. That’s by design and that also is a cause for concern.
But in terms of applications, today there are 28 million Blockchain wallet users. The question is, does any one of these applications have 10 million subscribers? The answer is no. The bulk of the companies using blockchain are in the cryptocurrency transaction business. Ethereum, the second-ranked cryptocurrency is challenging Bitcoin for subscription leadership based on recent data analysis. But it is pretty hard to pin down the numbers because those dealing with cryptocurrencies can have many addresses or many unique contracts each registered as a unique Internet address. So estimates for these two cryptocurrencies vary wildly from as little as 2.9 to as high as 35 million global users.
A non-cryptocurrency application, Gameflip, which trades gamer digital goods has 3 million users.
Thunderchain, launched earlier this year, claims it can conduct millions of transactions per second. It uses a consensus model (see the diagram below), an algorithm based on its own regulatory framework to ensure that all transactions are uniquely defined, follow the same rules with no double entries, always feature consistent block formats, and proof-of-work is fully transparent.
Chen believes that once the milestones mentioned above are achieved and surpassed, then blockchain will change the way we share and own our personal data on the Internet.
In an article appearing in the BlockExplorer News yesterday, Chen states “blockchain will challenge the data ownership models of today because data should be of the people for the people by the people.” Sounds like she has been reading Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and applying its principles to consensus-based distributed ledgers.
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