Instant digital transaction’s ranging
from 3 cents to 3 thousand fiat dollars.
People’s laziness has brought about a lot of changes in this world. One place this is often seen is when people type in Text or Chat. They often abbreviate things to save themselves time. In the early days of Bitcoin things were much the same. When people were talking about Transactions they would often talk about if one has received a Transaction ID. This later got shortened by people to Tx ID and then further shortened to simply TX. When DASH was discussing issues that needed solving with first generation Digital Currencies one thing that came up along side scaling of block sizes and times was the requirement of waiting for blocks to confirm a transaction wasn’t going to be reversible on the network. Traditional wallet software waits for 6 Proof of Work blocks to consider a transaction fully confirmed on the network.
The number six was chosen deliberately: it is based on a theory that there’s low probability of wrongdoers being able to amass more than 10% of entire network’s hash rate for purposes of transaction falsification and an insignificant risk (lower than 0.1%) is acceptable. For offenders who don’t possess significant computing power, 6 confirmations are an insurmountable obstacle. In their turn people who possess more than 10% of power aren’t going to find it hard to get 6 confirmations in a row. However to obtain such a power would require millions of dollars’ worth of investments which lowers the risk of an attack. Bitcoins that are distributed by the network for finding a block can only be used after 100 confirmations e.g. 100 discovered blocks. The classic bitcoin client won’t display the coins earned for solving a block until there are 120 confirmations. – Source
After building the first Tier 2 service for DASH to solve fungibility it became apparent to the dev’s that this second tier could also offer a solution to the need to wait for 6 transactions for a block to be considering not re-spendable. This is where Instant Transaction -> Instant TX -> InstanT X -> InstantX came from. InstantX uses the distributed network of Masternode’s to Lock a TX in place so that the very first Proof of Work block that arrives after the TX is sent can provide sufficient protection from the TX being reversed. Coin’s sent using InstantX arrive in the receiving party’s wallet with the equivalent of 5/6 Proof of Work confirms and as soon as the next block arrives the TX is locked in place. During the beta stage of InstantX the current limit is set to under 1000 DASH. At the time of writing DASH was trading around $3 USD which means DASH currently supports Instant Transaction’s ranging in size from 3 cents to 3 thousand fiat dollars. Not bad!?
Since this is the TL;DR overview of InstantX don’t forget to dig into the code over at Github or consult the Whitepaper.
By utilizing Masternode quorums, users are able to send and receive instant irreversible transactions. Once a quorum has been formed, the inputs of the transaction are locked to only be spendable in a specific transaction, a transaction lock takes about 4 seconds to be set currently on the network. If consensus is reached on a lock by the Masternode network, all conflicting transactions or conflicting blocks would be rejected thereafter, unless they matched the exact transaction ID of the lock in place.
This will allow vendors to use mobile devices in place of traditional POS systems for real world commerce and users to quickly settle facetoface non commercial transactions as with traditional cash. This is done without a central authority.