Discussing the Future of eCash & Avalanche with ABC's Anthony Zegers (Part I)
eCash’s revolutionary proposal (integrating the best of the Proof of Work and Proof of Stake consensus) has awakened concerns and even prompted some in the media to declare eCash was abandoning proof of work (PoW). This was automatically denied by the main man behind eCash, Amaury Sechet, who stated proof of work was here to stay.
Per the roadmap revealed on eCash’s official website, we already know there are some proof of stake elements involved in the future of eCash. Avalanche is a revolutionary consensus model that allows for a faster realization of operations in a network using it. Proposed by a team of investigators led by Emin Gun Sirer, the algorithm has already been applied successfully to the AVAX cryptocurrency platform.
To better understand how Avalanche will be implemented by eCash, eCash News talked with Anthony Zegers, a member of the Bitcoin ABC team. Zegers explained that Avalanche would bring numerous improvements to how eCash works.
While Zegers explained that eCash will benefit from implementing Avalanche in several ways, the first feature they are working on is in adding it in post consensus. This means that it will help keep transactions secure after being issued in the blockchain. This is the main concern now that eCash is a minority SHA-256 chain. Implementing Avalanche consensus would give the blockchain an edge when facing possible 51% attacks. In the words of Zegers:
“For the case of reorg attacks, Avalanche is a solid method for all miners to come to a consensus on when to reject large reorgs, without risk of splitting the defender chain.”
Zegers compares Nakamoto’s consensus with Avalanche and states the former needs time to achieve its final status. Proof of work-based chains have a natural limit in their block time: if it gets too low, it might cause a large number of orphans and an unstable chain. In contrast, Avalanche reaches finality in much less time. According to Zegers’ article:
“Avalanche is like instant messaging a group of friends. The message client is always on and is very reliable and resilient to attacks. Proof of Work is like carving messages onto stone tablets every ten minutes. It is much more permanent, and more expensive to participate.”
In the next part, we will chat with Zegers about how to implement Avalanche for pre consensus purposes.
Follow eCash News and subscribe to our Telegram channel to obtain daily updates about the development of eCash.