The Burst Dymaxion white paper is finally out, and it is arguably the most important piece of news in the history of Burst. For those who don’t know the PoC Consortium, it is a group composed of highly skilled developers that came to the coin in August 2017 with the promise of leading it to its rightful place among the top cryptocurrencies. The Dymaxion white paper released this December 27th marks the beginning of the stage 2 of their strategy. They believed Burst had an incredible advantage with the unique, energy efficient and fair Proof-of-Capacity consensus protocol and with smart contracts – yet they knew that it wasn’t enough.

In fact, most cryptocurrencies today are not ready to be used globally. Bitcoin’s high energy consumption and fees and the relative slowness for transactions make it a bad choice for daily microtransactions. We have seen many proposals to allow for a cryptocurrency that can be effectively used by the whole world without scalability problems, but so far nothing truly convincing had been presented.

The PoC Consortium is changing that with the Dymaxion. The developers are introducing a new concept, yet not just a theoretical one: it is an assortion of already existing technologies that were already proven in real-life usage to work. The job of the PoC Consortium is to do the integration – we are way beyond a “proof-of-concept” theoretical phase. In this article, we are going to study in simple terms how this concept takes the best traits of the original Burst, IOTA, Monero, Zcash and the newest Bitcoin proposals to create a cryptocurrency for truly global use.

How does it work?

We assume that the reader is already familiar with the functioning of the blockchain technology. With the Dymaxion, the PoC Consortium took inspiration from the latest Lightning Network proposals to implement layers to the Burst network in the form of payment channels. The uniqueness of the Dymaxion concept lies in the fact that each of these payment channels is opened in the form of standalone colored tangles, on top of the Burst blockchain that runs on the Proof-of-Capacity protocol.

With the Dymaxion, the blockchain is mainly used to open and close tangles. If you have not studied the tangle technology, it is described in the IOTA white paper: the tangle is basically a DAG that allows for making transactions without fees. Network nodes can validate transactions and by this validation work actually earn the right to perform transactions themselves. IOTA is running on one tangle – the Burst network will be able to have thousands of tangles running as payment channels simultaneously.

So, as we are keeping the Burst Proof-of-Capacity blockchain as a base layer, we also keep all its advantages – namely the energy efficiency and the better fairness and mining decentralization – over Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake. The PoC Consortium considers these advantages as crucial for a global currency. With the tangle payment channels, we also open the way to a completely scalable, fast and free of fees transaction network.

A truly global and scalable transaction network

The Dymaxion can allow billions of transactions per day. In fact, the number of transaction it can handle is potentially infinite. Each single of the tangle-based lightning networks distributes “transactional stress” among its own network of participating nodes, allowing for arbitrary scalability. The more nodes participate, the higher the transactional capacity of each of the current active networks becomes – every new user making transactions is increasing the total transactional capacity of the network.

Anybody can open a payment channel. Institution such as banks, clearing houses or remittance processors can open tangle-based lightning networks for their users, not limited in transaction capacity. Each payment network is composed of its own monetary units (e.g. StarbuckDollars, SteamBucks…) backed by BURST. Payment channels are opened and closed using Atomic Cross-Tangle Transactions (ACTTs) with desired properties: annonymity, network size, validation reqirements, duration, etc. and are kept open for a defined duration (e.g. one day for daytrading on Wallstreet).

Opening a Tangle has a fixed cost (fee), and in addition to that a number of Burst – called the collateral – is blocked in the issuers account as the backing unit. The collateral remains unspendable for the issuer until the tangle folds (=closes).

As Burst remains Burst, normal transactions directly on chain are of course still possible. But these will compete with ACTTs opening/closing tangles. The Burst blockchains currently allows for 255 transactions per block, with a block every 4 minutes. It can therefore open/close 255 tangles every 4 minutes, or open/close 91800 per day. The maximum number of Burst transactions is also going to be improved in the future – hundreds of thousands of tangles will be able to be opened or closed every day, each tangle constituting a fast, fee-less, secure and scalable payment channel.

An anonymous transaction network

Cryptocurrencies that insist on their users’ anonymity are numerous and quite popular. Monero and Zcash are among the best known ones. They base their anonymity feature on two technologies – zk-SNARK for Zcash and Ring Signature for Monero. I am not going to explain in details how these technologies function as many articles already serve that purpose accross the Internet.

The payment channel issuer is able to issue a tangle following his desired properties – he has the possibility to use zk-SNARK or Ring Signature technologies for it, or he can choose to keep it public by default. This way, people seeking complete anonymity will be able to do so in a truly scalable, fee-less and energy efficient payment network.

With the Dymaxion white paper, the PoC Consortium is setting the tone for 2018. A consequent road is ahead of us in terms of implementation and forks. The Dymaxion white paper details other things that are not discussed in this article and that are going to be integrated in 2018 such as the PoC2 consensus algorithm, dynamic block size and transaction fees, Dynamic node capabilities and finally PoC3 (post-Dymaxion). Stay tuned for more articles on The Burstcoinist detailing these elements, and enjoy the news.

Also published on Medium.