Hey Blockchain Devs, Waves Doesn’t Want to Hear Your Excuses

As part of a blog post detailing a different approach to blockchain transaction scaling, Waves Smart Contracts head of development, Ilya Smagin, noted the blockchain space often makes excuses for its shortcomings. 

"One of the things blockchain people are good at is explaining why user restrictions and inconveniences are insignificant and are actually the solutions rather than the problems," Smagin said in a June 4 post.

Blockchain is still a young industry  

Although some of the underpinnings and inspiration for blockchain tech came into play in years prior, the technology gained true ground with the inception of Bitcoin's white paper in 2008. Blockchain has seen significant adoption since 2008, although many aspects still show the tech's youth — transaction times and limits, private key clunkiness, and the proliferation of hacks come to mind.

"Seed phrases, instead of being risky and hard to manage, become 'staying in control' or even 'easy to remember,'" Smagin said, spinning the situation in the same fashion he claimed as common for the industry.

He added:

"Every DeFi hack, essentially a loss of funds, is a 'valuable lesson' (which is sometimes as lame as teaching entrepreneurs to write tests for their code). Low throughput 'drives competitive fee rates'. As such, gas limits during script execution 'ensure the stability of the network,'".  

Waves mentioned an abstract solution

Smagin detailed a solution to the proposed blockchain transaction problem. Noting the necessity of blockchain transaction limits, he took a different approach to the puzzle, calling it the "under-the-hood" method. "Business transactions should be split into blockchain transactions," he posited. 

The approach essentially divides business transactions into a number of blockchain transactions, completing the process automatically instead of needing manual interference with each event. 

A number of other camps also currently work on scaling issues in one way or another, including Bitcoin's Lightning Network — a second-layer solution for transactions.