While I was stuffed into a subway car this morning like a sardine, there was a moment where I felt like my spirit was squeezed from my body.

At this time, I am usually stuck in rush-hour traffic in my car, psychologically fretful but physically comfy, except for the fact that my car is currently in the garage for a quite severe scratch thanks to the driver, my colleague.

But at least no one got injured. Bad news is better than worse news.

Some people believe that ‘Bad news can be better than no news’ — headline of a New York Times article published on October 24th 2008.

“People who are mildly neurotic are stressed by uncertainty even more than by bad news,” the writer Roni Caryn Rabin wrote in the article.

Are passionate crypto traders “mildly neurotic”? I don’t know about others, but I prefer a fluctuating market over a quiet market.

The reason I bring this up is because a piece of news popped up yesterday morning saying that the 24-hour Ethereum on-chain transaction volume jumped by approximately 46% day-on-day, which, in itself, is not necessarily a bullish market indicator.

But, if we see it from a blockchain evangelist’s perspective rather than a crypto trader’s, could anyone blame a public chain for showing strong transactional activity?

Speaking of public chain, as I mentioned in the last post, I believe it is one of the verticals with the greatest potential. In general, it has a very bright future.

I suppose not many people understand the technology super thoroughly, so here are some tips that I apply, based on the frame of one theory — The Impossible Trinity.

Also known as The Trilemma, it was originally an economics theory which suggests that, due to mutual exclusivity, at most two of the following options could be met when making international monetary policy (China sacrifices the second option) — fixed currency exchange, free cross-border capital flow and autonomous monetary policy.

The blockchain world has derived its own impossible trinity:

a) Being strongly scalable.

b) Being fully decentralized;

c) Being perfectly secure;

Bitcoin and Ethereum are the most typical public chains with scalability issues. The former is holding up at 7 transactions per second (TPS), while the latter could double the number to 15 -20 TPS.

EOS performs much better in terms of scalability as it is able to process 1000 transactions in a blink. And yet, VISA’s TPS figure stands at an insurmountable 24,000, at least for now.

As for full decentralization, what do you think makes EOS’s TPS figure so much more impressive than Bitcoin’s and Ethereum’s?

Just as the name of the consensus EOS applies indicates — delegated proof-of-stake — while there are delegates, there also are mandators or voters, whatever you call them. It is technically not full decentralization.

Now, my negative example of security just perfectly proves the exclusivity. Zilliqa, with its sharding technology, successfully brings the TPS up to 2448. There’s not much dispute over it being decentralized either.

However, the basic concept of this technology is to divide the network into shards, which process the computing synchronously to achieve better efficiency.

A smaller-size network is naturally more vulnerable against DDoS attacks and double-spending attacks, among other threats. Thus, it must, on one hand, guarantee an acceptable computing efficiency while, on the other hand, make sure the shards include the most honest nodes possible to stand against the potential attacks.

Sorry, my bad. Enough for the dark side. My intention is to encourage you guys to keep your eyes on the donut, not the hole. There are always challenges, but there are also always solutions.

Plus, what is the satisfactory scalability of blockchain? Simply benchmarking VISA’s 24,000 TPS? Or a million-level TPS, the target (not vision) Vitalik set for Ethereum for the foreseeable future? Let’s say in the foreseeable future that the target is achieved and there are actually millions of deals being executed on chain. Is there a proper solution for mega data storage?

Technology never stops evolving and one can hardly hope for perfection.

Same for us, being just a crypto trader, we should know certain trading skills and tools; being a blockchain technology follower, we must keep absorbing updated knowledge.

I aim to be both. And you?