Teechan hardware Bitcoin scaling achieves 2,500 transactions per second, easier and more efficient than SegWit

Bitcoin, its Core developers, and its underlying blockchain technology have done their job so far. Bitcoin has proven to be more than just hype, and has real capabilities and overall value. This global technology experiment is almost perfect, except for one thing.

Bitcoin still hasn’t been able to scale effectively, with theoretical transaction speeds still limited to just 7 transactions per second, and less than half that in real-world applications. The Segregated Witness (SegWit) scaling solution doesn’t look like it’s coming anytime soon. But now there’s a new proposal that might solve the problems SegWit can’t. Developers from Imperial College London and Cornell University, led by Professor Emin Gun Sirer, have created a new proposal for scaling using secure hardware, Teechan. This proposal could turn Bitcoin into a global economic force. But will it succeed?

SegWit is currently unable to gain enough support from miners. It is clear that SegWit is not the easiest implementation plan, and currently only about a quarter of the voting community supports SegWit. Joshua Lind, Ittay Eyal, Peter Pietzuch and Professor Emin Gün Sirer believe that SegWit is not the right implementation plan and we have a simpler expansion solution.

Their research shows that simply increasing the block size to 4MB or even 10MB will not achieve the real scalability you want. The Lightning Network and two-layer micropayment channels can scale Bitcoin, but they require fundamental changes to the Bitcoin protocol, which is a bad idea. However, what if you can add something to the Bitcoin protocol to allow 2,500 transactions per second without major network changes like SegWit and the Lightning Network?

Teechan

The development team, led by Professor Emin Gün Sirer, said Teechan is both scalable and easy to implement. The technology has been proven to be effective because it is found in the latest commodity processors, such as Intel CPUs with Software Guard Extensions (SGE), and Teechan can take advantage of a trusted execution environment consisting of secure hardware components .

The team said in a blog post last week:

“Teechan does not require any changes to the existing Bitcoin network; it is secure even in terms of transaction malleability.”

“Teechan is efficient: payments only require a single message. Teechan is also very space-efficient, requiring only two transactions to be placed on the blockchain in all cases. With less reliance on on-chain transactions, Teechan is less vulnerable to attacks caused by blockchain vulnerabilities. Finally… our Teechan prototype achieves a throughput of 2,480 transactions per second per channel with a transaction latency of just 0.4 milliseconds.”

At the same time, if SegWit cannot be activated, the Lightning Network and other similar products will not be deployable, however, Teechan is not affected by whether SegWit is activated . All people using Teechan only need one message to send Bitcoin, which is significantly faster than the Lightning Network, which requires multiple round trips between the two parties to complete a transaction.

The Teechan team has released a draft of the Teechan whitepaper (full text download) and will create an alpha version in the coming weeks, but the official addition may not be until sometime in 2017. After all, the expansion solution is unlikely to be implemented quickly.