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An MIT test is giving a rare look at how bitcoin might work at scale.
The prominent university in the US has been calmly demoing a new use case for BLN or Bitcoin Lighting Network, which showcases how it may be combined with smart contracts not just to handle lots of transactions but do so with the highest level of complexity.
Modeled in the university’s Digital Currency Initiative, initiated in 2015 as a way to advance R&D on virtual currencies, the test imagines a system in which transactions will happen instantly in the case of distinct external events.
This is achievable because of MIT’s creative application of “oracles,” trusted units to broadcast information to smart contracts. For this presentation, researchers Alin S. Dragos and Tadge Dryja created a test oracle to air the current value of US dollars in satoshis, bitcoins smallest unit which anyone can get and utilize for smart contracts.
According to Alin S. Dragos, they created this as a standalone feature of their lighting network program. They choose data that they believed will be cool, but it can any information you want, whether a stock or weather.
The presentation is only experimental and must not be utilized for real currency. Dragos and other researchers of MIT are convinced that with the assistance of the Bitcoin Lighting Network, BTC may have one day scale to facilities originally imagined by its past users.
As part of that work, researchers have already made a completion for the lighting network known as LIT, and this oracle system is an add-on of that work.
Dragos also mentioned that they “believe in LIT.” BTC does not scale very well. He decided there has to be something better. Turn out what is better is lighting. It is the way to scale.”
But, while LIT offers scale, smart contracts put in other new functionality to Bitcoin. Like for instance, should the technology in MIT’s test be completed, you can make some bet based on what is taking place in the world.
Dragos admitted that when people think smart contract, ethereum is the first thing that comes to their minds. The scripting idiom is much richer, he added. However, he argues that with workarounds, BTC can do a similar thing. It is not a developer friendly as Bitcoin did not in which direction. However one can utilize it. You need to be creative.
