Starlink Dogecoin Relay Network
There exist several technical bottlenecks to scale Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains. Some of them are the CPU time for transaction validation, the hard disk space to store the chain, and many others.
One of the most often overlooked bottlenecks is the communication latency and Internet speed between miners. The slower the Internet between the miners is, the less synchronized they become, and the more the blockchain security degrades. That is one of the fundamental reasons why it’s not trivial to scale Doge- or Bitcoin by simply increasing the block-time frequency and the block size. I’ve quantified this dilemma in a paper, and provided a network simulator to quantify the impact of re-parametrizations of Bitcoin.
Dogecoin on Starlink?
Now, one way to speed up a blockchain without any protocol change is to simply improve the network connectivity between the miners! This is where Starlink, the satellite-based Internet from SpaceX could help Dogecoin to be closer to the moon.
Mark Handley beautifully simulated how much lower the latency of Starlink would be, when compared to the current terrestrial Internet. For example, he estimates that the round trip time (RTT) between London and Singapore would be about 108ms on Starlink, while Fiber optic Internet currently yields 159ms.
Starlink is certainly already highly anticipated by traditional financial institutions to perform lower latency arbitrage across the major financial exchanges. Using Starlink as a network to propagate blockchain peer-to-peer data among miners would equally help speed up substantially the current blockchain throughput, without deteriorating its security. Naturally, a possible risk here would be for a single for-profit company to effectively own the entire blockchain relay network, a risk that may be mitigated with future orthogonal satellite Internet services.
Blockchain Relay Network
Analogous to the FIBRE network, Erlay, and other prior relay networks, Dogecoin could very well scale its transaction throughput by orders of magnitude, if its miners were to engage in a dedicated Starlink relay network. Naturally, this relay network propagation protocol should be optimized for the Starlink characteristics to fully take advantage of its topology. Quantifying the optimal protocol, and parameters is certainly a very exciting avenue towards scaling Dogecoin!
