Unveiling Decentralization: A Comprehensive Review of Technologies, Comparison, Challenges in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana Blockchain
Han Song, Yihao Wei, Zhongche Qu, Weihan Wang
TL;DR
The paper surveys three pivotal blockchain platforms—Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana—exploring decentralization, architectures, and core challenges. It details Bitcoin's UTXO/PoW model, Ethereum's account/gas/contract paradigm with PoS, and Solana's Proof of History augmented by a PoS layer to boost throughput. Key findings discuss energy efficiency, latency, scalability, and security trade-offs, including Bitcoin's $21,000,000$ supply cap and halving every $210,000$ blocks, Ethereum's dynamic gas mechanism, and Solana's time-ordered processing. The work provides a comparative lens for researchers, developers, and practitioners to assess design choices and future directions in decentralized platforms.
Abstract
Bitcoin stands as a groundbreaking development in decentralized exchange throughout human history, enabling transactions without the need for intermediaries. By leveraging cryptographic proof mechanisms, Bitcoin eliminates the reliance on third-party financial institutions. Ethereum, ranking as the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, builds upon Bitcoin's groundwork by introducing smart contracts and decentralized applications. Ethereum strives to surpass the limitations of Bitcoin's scripting language, achieving full Turing-completeness for executing intricate computational tasks. Solana introduces a novel architecture for high-performance blockchain, employing timestamps to validate decentralized transactions and significantly boosting block creation throughput. Through a comprehensive examination of these blockchain technologies, their distinctions, and the associated challenges, this paper aims to offer valuable insights and comparative analysis for both researchers and practitioners.