Quarkchain for Dummies

ICO Season is here and the last thing you’d want is to pump your money into a scam.

What beginner investors would do is to google for the Top 10 ICOs and do some research on it. If you’re reading this in April~May 2018 and heard of the Quarkchain hype, you’ve come to the right place.

I will be commencing a blog on “<Insert Coin here> for Dummies” so non-programmers and people who don’t speak the IT lingo will know what exactly they are investing in. If Bitcoin is confusing enough, altcoin jargon will be a nightmare to understand.

Firstly, before investing in any ICO — always be curious to be find what is the project trying to solve. A business will always be profitable when it solves real-world problems and there is a recognised demand for it.

What does Quarkchain solve? More importantly, why should you invest in it over Bitcoin or Ethereum or chicken nuggets?

Speed is power.

When I pass you some money, that’s 1 transaction. If you pass me some money, that’s 1 transaction.

Right now, the crypto world is slow in processing transactions. Too many transactions will jam the entire network and slow it down (think of it as overstraining your computer to run multiple games at once)

For example, Bitcoin supports approximately 4 transactions per second (TPS), and Ethereum supports approximately 10 TPS.

Renowned fiat payment companies such as Visa and Mastercard can process 45,000 transactions per section.

And here’s the kicker — Quarkchain puts forward a bold claim that it can create a platform which allows 1 million transactions per second.

Can this really be done? Heck, any Tom, Dick and Harry can come out and say they will launch an ICO project which can run 10 trillion transactions per second and give it a random name like QuackChain for all they care.

The inherent problems in blockchain.

Why couldn’t anyone think of this earlier? Why didn’t the founders of Ethereum, Litecoin and all other altcoins just get together and say hey let’s find a solution to increase our transactions per second?

The problem that Quarkchain solves here is increasing the number of transactions while keeping it “decentralised” and secure enough for the blockchain. You can’t just walk into a room and tell your crypto-developers “hey, please increase the transactions per second for our cryptocurrency so we can compete with Quarkchain.”

You want to maintain the same level of security, yet making sure it doesn’t become centralised when a powerful group of people try to takeover too many nodes.

Quarkchain has found to solution to solve this problem. The blockchain is made up of 2 primary layers. Get ready for some jargon, but we will break it down slowly.

1. The first layer has multiple elastic blockchains that act as “shards”; and

2. The second layer is a root blockchain that confirms the blocks from the first layer.

Let’s not get confused! Multiple elastic blockchains means that the number of “sharded” blockchains in it can be increased or decreased depending on the requirements.

The second layer acts like the “King”. All shards must bow down and report to it.

See the picture below for reference -

In the current testnet for QuarkChain, which is already up and running, these “shards” a.k.a. mini-blockchains have been clocking in at 100 to 200 transactions per second (TPS). The overall network currently runs with a total of 8 sharded blockchains and can handle 1 to 1.3k transactions per second collectively.

Selfish mining creates a decentralized environment

QuarkChain introduces the “Collaborative Mining” system. Miners are encouraged to mine in accordance to their own selfish tendencies (such as how most people in the world currently operate). The difference here is that the system is designed such that when everyone decides to act selfishly in their best interest, it collectively supports the entire network because they are putting in the best effort.

It has been designed specifically so that miners are able to select and mine directly to any of the sharded blockchains. This means they do not have a good reason to join mining pools and end up creating a powerful centralized team of miners. It makes more sense to go solo on this.

Is it secure though?

Here’s one of Quarkchain’s weak points. What did you expect? No one is perfect!

In order to launch a hash attack against Quarkchain, a total of 25% computing power is needed to start manipulating the blocks. This is half the computing power needed for Bitcoin (>50%).

If miners somehow got together and combine their computing power to form a spirit bomb whose attack power is over 25% of the entire network… Quark is screwed. You are screwed.

However, if we refer to the above example on decentralization, miners do not have any incentive to combine forces because they can already do it themselves. It would require a hell lot of propaganda and group incentives to entice miners to team up for a special attack.

QuarkChain’s crowdsale is slated for late May or early June. If you believe in their million transaction revolution, please check them out.

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