To those of you who might not know, Skelpy is an up-and-coming block chain ecosystem that incentivizes transparency and openness directly linked to the wallet in order to push forward the progress of financial technology in the direction of further mass adoption.
Most of you must have heard of Bitcoin and you might be wondering, how is Skelpy any different than Bitcoin?
The one that is already mentioned above, is one major difference. Whereas Bitcoin prides itself in secrecy and anonymity, Skelpy actually promotes openness and transparency. There are also a couple of features in the SkelpySystem that Bitcoin lack, some of them being tiered wallet visibility, an inbuilt market for selling and trading Skelpy as well as a ‘return passphrase’ feature for those wallet owners that may have misplaced their private key somewhere. These myriad of features are all available due to the fact that the SkelpySystem and hence the users are transparent and not shrouded in mystery.
What I would like to address today is one of the fundamental processes that Skelpy differs from Bitcoin, and that is the consensus algorithm used.
A refresher course on what consensus is, and how it relates to block chain in general; block chain in itself is just a way to store data. The difference being that there is no central server or entity in charge of this data. In order to update the entries in this data, an agreement amongst the participants have to be made. This is called a consensus. Traditionally, in Bitcoin, consensus is done by ‘miners’ directing computing power towards the Bitcoin ledger and verifying the transactions that occur, and once verified, a new ‘block’ will be added on top of the old one with the verified data. Creating a chain of blocks containing every transaction beginning from the inception of Bitcoin until now. This system is called proof of work.
Skelpy on the other hand does not use this system and instead opt to use DPoS (Delegate Proof of Stake) in order to validate transactions. Owners of the Skelpy wallet vote on delegates, in this case 51 of them, and the people with the most votes become delegates and bear the responsibility of verifying the transactions in the SkelpySystem as well as keeping the system secure in general. The vote themselves have a certain weight depending on how much the wallet contain. Hence the ‘stake’ part. People with the most stake in the game, i.e. people with the most to lose, have the largest say since they are the ones that in theory will want the best for the system as a whole. So in theory, a highly reputable and trusted member of the community will most likely be voted as a delegate.
How is this any better than proof of work you may ask?
One of the major arguments against Bitcoin and block chain in general is that the process of mining is very wasteful and uses a lot of energy just for the sake of keeping the system up and running. The more competition this breeds, the more wasteful the energy expenditure. Using a DPoS system on the other hand, does not consume all that much energy. The only energy expenditures to keep the system up and running are the 51 nodes (in Skelpy’s case) that require to be on. Each delegate is allocated a time slot to verify and secure the network.
At first glance, proof of work might seem decentralized, but the way it is now adays, the system is very much like DPoS where only a couple of big mining pools hold the total majority of hashing power. Since Bitcoin difficulty has increase so much that it will take a couple of million years for a solo computer to find a new block, people have resorted to joing mining pools in the hopes that they can get a share of the bounty. This in fact is a form of centralization. By using DPoS, everyone; no matter how seemingly small, has at least a voice that they can use in the form of voting.
It is true however that this system is free from complete decentralization since those in power are those 51 delegates. But this is an issue of scalability. The more people required to verify transactions, the slower in general transactions become confirmed and as is with the case with Bitcoin back in 2017, hundreds of transactions were backlogged because the system couldn’t handle the sheer quantity of it. Since there is no perfect way to completely decentralize something, this seems like a fair trade-off to sufficiently decentralize Skelpy without compromising scalability.
In essence, the old proof of work method has ended up becoming the same as DPoS in the rise of mining pools, yet much more wasteful in terms of resources consumed. That is why Skelpy, has the right goal in mind when choosing DPoS as a consensus algorithm.
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Author: lani123lani
Bitcointalk profile: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1220105
Skelpy Wallet Address: AaMTWSH5XPdXdbWr3tk2VhCCt2nx8A HVmD
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