I think that everyone here on this forum is here simply because we suspect that ADA might become huge in the future - this belief stems from the idea that blockchain tech will be the money of the future, or at least an important part of the money of the future.
But are our assumptions really correct?
I am NO experts at all - rather just an interested noob >>> but from my own analysis my current guess is that blockchain currencies will not be the day to day money of the future but rather simply function as a kind of personal, hidden, anonymous store of value. I think that the money of the future will have to be build on a platform that will be able to handle millions of transactions per second globally… blockchain will probably never manage this.
Also, while I am an ardent supporter of decentralization, I begin to wonder if “daily use digital money” will be decentralized.
I think we are all here because we are speculating financially and hoping to find the next big thing… so my question is this:
- what other tech. might be it (other than blockchain)?
@epowell
Let’s say I’ve been similarly skeptical. With Bitcoin and other PoW networks I’m still doing that because they work according to the principle “quickly out on the market than the others, and then we’ll look further”. Not to mention the power consumption for guessing the hash numbers.
Then I started to read myself into Cardano and was more and more convinced.
Beside other topics there is an entire paragraph about scalability on https://whycardano.com
There are further informations like some great whiteboard videos on IOHKs youtube channel if you want to know more about these “epochs” in Ouroboros Proof of Stake algorithm.
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I think the PoS protocol of Ouroboros offers the best tradeoffs between performance while maintaining decentralization/security and use should be able to scale as needed as Cardano/Ada grows to hopefully become a daily use currency.
This talk gives an excellent overview of the tradeoffs of various blockchain options (PoS, POW, Byzantine) vs current central database and is an excellent tutorial on Ouroboros:
And for a quick highlight, here’s the chart in the video I’m referring to:
The only other tech I’m aware of that might have an edge is:
1- RaiBlocks, where everyone maintains their own blockchain of just their buy/sell transactions and thus there is no central blockchain which frees up performance…but it’s a pretty unproven architecture overall at this point vs Ouroboros has been rigorously reviewed.
2 - Tangle (or Directed Acylic Graphs) - this is IOTA’s architecture and basically is a web of transactions and in theory gets faster the more nodes as each node does 2 puzzles to add a transaction. Also a bit unproven as far as I can tell.
Even Mastercard just rolled out their own blockchain to speed up transactions for one region, so I’m sure blockchain will eventually dominate in some form for future daily currency, but who specifically wins is hard to say yet. Hopefully Cardano!
*I should add that in this video above,they apparently showed 257 TPS on a test net of 40 nodes running Ouroboros, so that’s already way better than BTC and 3-7 TPS.
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Scalability is one of the reasons 3rd Generation Blockchain had to be created. I remember the time when downloading from when downloading something from early P2P networks (Limewire,Napster, etc) would take many times longer than a direct download and then bitTorrent made me realize that P2P when scales property with each resource on the network can be hundreds of times faster than a direct download. 
is setting up to be the bitTorrent of of crypto world.
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