While our newly minted project manager is busy getting our ducks in a row with the product roadmap, and our UI/UX designers are discovering new and exciting ways to improve usability, we’d like to draw your attention to a special feature that makes 5ireChain the blockchain for the quantum age.
No Hard Forks Over Here, No Sir!
Have you ever heard the term “hard fork” before in the blockchain space ecosystem? We’re sure you have. A hard fork happens when a blockchain’s network’s programming logic changes, often in such a way that nodes that were created before the new changes are unable to remain in consensus with nodes that do. Thus, these changes are effectively backward incompatible. Hard forks can also be used as a political manoeuvre due to the nature of the upgrades, as well as a logistical nightmare, due to the number of nodes in the network that need to be upgraded with new software.
To do away with this onerous exercise in changing a chain’s “business logic” in the nodes, 5ireChain nodes come equipped with a WebAssembly execution host. Their function is to maintain the network consensus on a very low level and with a well-established instruction set.
This allows 5ireChain to upgrade its runtime seamlessly by changing the business logic stored on-chain and it does away with the onerous coordination challenge of asking a huge number of node operators to do the upgrade in advance of a specific event. Upgrades can be implemented seamlessly following a governance change or when stakeholders propose and approve upgrades via our on-chain governance system.
Ready For the Quantum Age
Our wallet keys will be beyond the reach of quantum computers’ processing power to break cryptological keys generated.
Blockchains rely on asymmetric key cryptography algorithms, namely the ECDSA, or elliptic curve digital signature algorithm. ECDSA is used for wallet addresses, signing transactions, and validating new blocks. One could say that existence of the blockchain is dependent upon the security of asymmetric key cryptography. ECDSA is based on a mathematical problem called the discrete logarithm problem (DLP). Elliptic curves have been used for quite a while in public-key cryptography, primarily because there is no known sub-exponential algorithm to solve the discrete logarithm problems contained on general elliptic curves.
The most efficient theoretical implementation of a quantum computer to detect an SHA-256 collision is actually less efficient than the theorized classical implementation for breaking the standard. The wallet file in the original Bitcoin client uses SHA-512 (a more secure version than SHA-256) to help encrypt private keys.
Thanks to Moore’s law and better classical computing, secure RSA key sizes have grown so large so as to be impractical compared to elliptic curve cryptography. As a result, most blockchains, like Bitcoin, opt for elliptic curve cryptography for performance reasons for their systems.
More information about 5ireChain can be found by clicking on the following links:
Website: https://5ire.org
White paper: https://bit.ly/5ireWP
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/5ireChain
Twitter: https://twitter.com/5irechain
Discord: https://discord.gg/GAWXJKnZQH
Telegram: https://t.me/OfficialFireChain
