Elon Musk's Starlink Can Help Scale Up Dogecoin Without Protocol Changes, Proposes Researcher

Starlink, the internet service powered by SpaceX’s constellation of satellites, can be useful in the efforts to scale Dogecoin by improving network connectivity between miners, according to a lecturer at Imperial College London.

What Happened: Arthur Gervais, whose research is centered on security, privacy, and “financial aspects” of decentralized technology, made the revelation in a post on Github.

Gervais said that communication latency and internet speed between miners was one of the most “overlooked bottlenecks.” The researcher said that a way to “speed up a blockchain” without any protocol change is to improve connectivity between miners.

“This is where Starlink, the satellite-based Internet from SpaceX could help Dogecoin to be closer to the moon.”

See Also: How to Buy Dogecoin (DOGE)

Giving the example of low latency that exists on Starlink’s system compared to existing terrestrial Internet, Gervais said estimates point that the round trip time (RTT) between London and Singapore would be 108 ms on Starlink compared the 159ms on fiber optic internet.

“Dogecoin could very well scale its transaction throughput by orders of magnitude, if its miners were to engage in a dedicated Starlink relay network,” wrote Gervais.

“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.”

Why It Matters: The proposed relay network should be “optimized for the Starlink characteristics to fully take advantage of its topology,” noted Gervais.

However, the researcher admitted that a “possible risk” was that a single for-profit company would effectively own the entire relay network, a risk he said, “may be mitigated with future orthogonal satellite Internet services.”

This month, Tesla Inc TSLA CEO Elon Musk, who also heads SpaceX, said he is working with DOGE developers to “improve system transaction efficiency.”

Musk recently asked his followers on Twitter to submit ideas related to Dogecoin development on Github and Reddit.

See Also: Dogecoin Subreddit Crosses 2 Million 'Subshibers' After Elon Musk's Call For 'Help'

DOGE has soared 7,338.01% so far this year, buoyed in part by Musk’s frequent tweets. At press time, the cryptocurrency traded 3.06% higher at $0.36. Against Bitcoin (BTC), DOGE was higher by 0.36%, and against Ethereum (ETH) lower by 5.12% over a 24-hour period. 

BTC traded 2.69% higher at $30,500.78 at press time.

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