For most of 2018 the blockchain and cryptocurrency ecosystems have been working hard on one gigantic shared problem: scalability. (See also: “In the Crypto Ecosystem, It’s Still 1968 — But We’re Moving Fast”).

But before you give up on blockchain scalability and declare Bitcoin dead, there are many viable ways that blockchains and DApps can scale, including, but not limited to:

Up until about the end of 2017, scaling on the Bitcoin blockchain was a big problem. Bitcoin is limited to a small handful of transactions per second. When people try to create more transactions per second than the blockchain can handle, the pool of waiting transactions grows to unsustainable levels, and transaction prices rise as participants pay premiums to get their transactions processed faster. In December 2017, Bitcoin transaction fees peaked at over $55 per transaction as a result.

Bitcoin average transaction fees over time: December 22, 2017: $55

The Po.et Network is a system of verifiable claims that get anchored to the Bitcoin blockchain, meaning that if we want to make a claim about something, there must be a corresponding Bitcoin transaction mined on the blockchain. The problem is that Bitcoin handles fewer than 7 transactions per second, which puts a hard cap of daily transactions at roughly half a million per day:

Bitcoin peak transactions/day during the December 2017: less than 500k

Breaking the blockchain speed limit is crucial for Po.et because we need to make a lot of claims.

How Does Claim Batching Work?

There are a lot of technical details related to claim batching that I won’t bore you with, but the basic concept is simple.

Po.et claim batching

A publisher (which could be you!) creates and signs a claim, which gets hashed — a hash is like a unique fingerprint for a piece of content — and placed into a batch by a Po.et Node. That batch is itself hashed and submitted to the Bitcoin blockchain. When the batch is confirmed (which could take some time — Bitcoin mines a new block about once every ten minutes), other Po.et Nodes detect the new batch hash, locate the batch, and verify the claims it contains.

Those claims get aggregated together to form the nutritional label for the world’s content.

What’s a Batch?

On Po.et, a claim batch is a connected tree of cryptographic claim hashes. The root of that tree is the Merkle root — a hash of all hashes in the batch.

With the Merkle tree, all we need to record on the Bitcoin blockchain is the Merkle root hash. That anchors the whole tree because it proves that everything that was in the batch existed prior to mining the root hash transaction. There is no limit to the number of claims we can batch into a single anchor transaction.

Merkle Tree: Only the root hash needs to be written to the blockchain

Why Blockchain Scalability Matters to Po.et

Recently, Po.et has been talking about providing a nutritional label for content. What does that mean?

Verifiable claims are claims that are cryptographically signed by their creators (called “issuers”). Anybody can issue a claim about content on Po.et, but they must digitally sign it with a private key, and then the claim and the signature get bundled together in a JSON-LD document and anchored to the Bitcoin blockchain, which proves that a claim existed at the time the block was mined.

On its own, a claim that you own a particular creative work may not be very interesting. For example, I could claim that I wrote “Moby Dick”, but anybody familiar with “Moby Dick” would know that claim is false. A claim is not a fact. It is only evidence.

Such a claim would not stand up for long on the Po.et Network, because on Po.et, people can make claims about claims, so there’s a good chance I’d get called out.

All the claims about a particular work get aggregated together into a unified view of the work called an entity. That entity is the sum of all claims made about something that has a representation on the Po.et Network.

All of the claims I make and all of the claims about those claims get aggregated together into a holistic view of the content I post, and what the Po.et ecosystem thinks about the claims I make. Over time, that builds verifiable reputation.

The aggregation of claims about a particular piece of content (including the reputation of the creator) can act like a nutritional label for content. It tells you something about how trustworthy (or not trustworthy) that content is.

The Po.et team sees a future in which all content has that nutritional label, and when you aggregate and sort content based on how healthy it is to consume, the result is a better, more trustworthy web where good actors are rewarded for creating good content, and where lies are difficult and expensive to maintain.

The is that every time you post an image of a beautiful sunset on your favorite social network, the Po.et Network could pick it up, verify that you’re the owner, and then more claims can be made about it, like “it’s beautiful”, “it’s a sunset”, or it fits a “relaxing mood”.

So, if Po.et users post 1 million sunset photos per day, that could generate 3 million claims about them. Those claims could help media organizations discover and license content for articles or broadcasts, help a publisher find and license content for a book cover, or help ad networks identify and block inappropriate content. (But who doesn’t like sunsets?)

Virtually every crypto or DApp project is going to have to contend with the problem of scalability. If you’re relying on the Po.et Network, don’t sweat it.

We’ll handle the batching for you.