Bitcoin Whitepaper Birthday Special: æternity’s 11 Advantages

The Bitcoin Whitepaper made me a life-long fan of bitcoin. The æternity one helped me realize that public blockchain technology could disrupt much more than money.

I love Bitcoin and I know everyone at æternity does, too.

It is the original cryptocurrency that unleashed the idea of borderless, public, permissionless, censorship-resistant value networks. For almost 11 years now Bitcoin has been the most well-known cryptocurrency and blockchain project. A “headless brand” that in 2019 could be considered a household name.

Bitcoin was the reason I entered the blockchain space in 2013 and I will always be one of its biggest fans.

Despite all that, Bitcoin is not perfect. And maybe it doesn’t need to be (it actually can’t be). Many call it the “Honey Badger of Money”, but to me it is more the “Horseshoe Crab of Money”, although the phrase is not that catchy.

The Horseshoe crab survived for more than 300 million years relatively unchanged. Apparently nature got it almost perfectly right the first time. Similar like Bitcoin.

That’s not what a large part of the blockchain industry thinks, however. And since the Bitcoin protocol is so hard to change (a feature, not a bug), tens of new blockchain-based infrastructure projects have sprouted since 2009. They are all looking for the same thing — that special ingredient that will make their platforms better than Bitcoin and hopefully, even more successful.

Bitcoin is amazing, but a public, trustless blockchain could be so much more!

Since today marks the 11th Birthday of Bitcoin’s Whitepaper, I will upgrade Peter Thiel’s popular “10x” rule and engage in an educational exercise. I will list the 11 advantages that the project I joined three years ago — æternity blockchain — has over Bitcoin.

This will be very much like a comparison between your two kids — you love them both, but you are well-aware of their strengths and weaknesses.

Here we go.

1. Faster On-Chain Speed

One of the biggest challenges in the blockchain space today is scalabilty. Bitcoin suffers from scalability issues, and so does Ethereum. You simply cannot have a global payment network with a measly 7 (Bitcoin) or 15 (Ethereum) transactions per second. At the same time, you shouldn’t be compromising decentralization for speed. Decentralization is the main feature of blockchains after all!

To address this, æternity has implemented the Cornell University-developed consensus mechanism — Bitcoin-NG. It is a modification of the popular Nakamoto Consensus used in Bitcoin and allows for on-chain speeds of up to 120 tx/s.

Currently, according to data from AEknow.org, the speed of the æternity network is 116 tx/s. That is more than 16 times faster than Bitcoin and almost 8 times faster than Ethereum.

To learn more about æternity implementation of the Bitcoin-NG consensus protocol, read this freshly published blog post by the æternity crypto foundation in Liechtenstein:

2. Faster Block Time

The on-chain speed is also affected by block times — the average speed of finding new blocks. Thanks to Bitcoin-NG, there are two kinds of blocks in æternity — Key Blocks and Micro Blocks.