Bitcoin Upgrade Lumino Introduces a New Approach to Scalability

Bitcoin’s block size debate may be getting a new option called Lumino. The proposed Bitcoin scaling solution will supposedly offer an upgrade to 100 Transactions Per Second (tps) without raising the block size or risking a hard fork.

Also read: Following a Day of Delays, Lukejr Proposes to Decrease the Block Size

What is Lumino?

Lumino takes a whole new approach to scaling Bitcoin, according to RSK’s (Rootstock’s) co-founder and Chief Scientist Sergio Demián Lerner, who is in charge of the project. In early January, during bitcoin’s steep rise to the year-to-date high, while all eyes were on the price charts, Lerner unveiled the project for the first time, tweeting that “I’m working on a new approach to scalability on PoW-based blockchains. Allows 5K tps over home PCs. Very exciting! Soon I’ll publish!”

At that time, he considered the yet-unnamed project just a sidechain for Bitcoin on the RSK platform. “Can this be used for #Bitcoin?”, a Twitter user asked him. Lerner replied: “As a sidechain, yes. As a hard-fork or soft-fork, it would require a lot of work. Our plan at @RSKsmart is a Bitcoin sidechain”. Lerner told Mooti CEO Bradley Chun: “It’s something truly different, looks like hub-and-spoke net, but in the background something different happens”.

Over the last month, the Rootstock Chief Scientist has been leaking hints about Lumino from his twitter feed, and early this week, he tweeted:

Since Lerner’s announcement, many people have asked him for access to the white paper. However, he did not publicly respond to those requests and has been quiet about who the reviewers are.

100 Transactions Per Second

Earlier this month, Lerner tweeted that 100 tps was demonstrated at blockchain developer conference Construct, which ran the last two days of January in San Francisco. In his tweet, he wrote:

While people argue about 2 MB hardfork, we demoed live in Construct how @RSKsmart sidechain allows 100 tps. Quietly, we’re changing history.

At Bitcoin’s current 3 to 7 tps, Lumino’s proposed 100 tps represents approximately 33 to 14 times more transactions in each block than Bitcoin currently allows, and 6 to 14 times more than it could have after a hard fork to two-megabyte blocks.

To accomplish this feat, Lerner explained that he has found a way to store all the information of a transaction inside a tiny amount of space, cramming that many transactions inside a single megabyte block. He also confirmed that Lumino does not require Segwit. Earlier this week, he tweeted:

I achieve 8 bytes per transaction under certain (uncommon) usage patterns. That’s only 64 bits.

64 bits of data is far smaller than each transaction is in a current block, which has somewhere between 18 bytes and several hundreds of bytes per transaction, depending on the number of input and output addresses that the transaction has. So even with the smallest transaction possible, the amount of space it would take up inside a block could be reduced significantly using Lumino.

‘The Best Way to Scale to 20K TPS’

On Saturday, Lerner’s latest hint addressed the long-term scaling solution by offering the possibility of scaling up to 20,000 tps with Lumino. He tweeted:

He also mentioned in another tweet that “Lumino is better as a sidechain of Bitcoin (@RSKSmart) to get 10 seconds confirmations, but could be also a Bitcoin soft-fork”.

What do you think of Lumino? Let us know in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock and RSK

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