The public chain is also called "public chain". Bitcoin is the first public chain in the world. The so-called public and private difference lies in whether the nodes on the chain are controllable by themselves. The public chain corresponds to the private chain; Bitcoin, Ethereum It is the most popular public chain nowadays.
A public chain refers to a blockchain in which anyone in the world can access the system at any time to read data, send verifiable transactions, and compete for accounting. Public chains are generally considered "completely decentralized" because no individual or institution can control or tamper with the reading and writing of data in them.
The public chain generally encourages participants to compete for bookkeeping through a token mechanism (Token) to ensure the security of data. In terms of application, the blockchain public chain includes Bitcoin, Ethereum, Hyperledger, most altcoins and smart contracts. The ancestor of the blockchain public chain is the Bitcoin blockchain.
At present, most Ethereum projects rely on Ethereum as a public chain. Ethereum is a new and open blockchain platform that allows anyone to build and use decentralized applications running through blockchain technology in the platform. Ethereum is a programmable blockchain that allows users to create complex operations as they wish, and can serve as a platform for many types of decentralized blockchain applications.
Any application scenarios that require high trust, security, and durability, such as asset registration, voting, management, and IoT applications in the 3.0 era, will be affected by the Ethereum platform on a large scale.
The biggest problem facing the public chain is the contradiction between security and efficiency, that is, how to strike a balance between the degree of decentralization and high TPS. The most typical representative is the battle between Ethereum and EOS.
Three major problems with Ethereum:
1. Low network congestion efficiency
Ethereum can only support 20 transactions per second, and one popular application can kill the network.
2. High transaction costs
Currently, DAPP creators spend about $1-3 in GAS per call to an Ethereum smart contract.
3. Poor scalability
Dapps can only issue coins on Ethereum, and cannot be chained. All Dapp applications on Ethereum can only share one main chain, and there are very few application scenarios that can be supported.
BM criticized the congestion of the Ethereum network, and Vitalik criticized that EOS only has 21 nodes. The two great gods attacked very rightly.
EOS is not as secure and reliable as Ethereum, which has 10,000 nodes, and it is much easier to attack 21 nodes than 10,000 nodes.
Ethereum is not as efficient as EOS. The main selling point of EOS in the past was that it could process millions of transactions per second. However, it was changed some time ago. There are only thousands of TPS left, but it is also 100 times faster than Ethereum.
Other well-known public chains include Cardano, NEO, QTUM, BYTOM, Aeternity, Aelf, Zilliqa, Metropolis, and more. At present, Cobo Wallet has supported more than 70 kinds of blockchain assets including ETH, EOS, TRX, QTUM, AE and other main chains, and more than 1700 kinds of tokens.