2016/07/05 by Jing Chen, Silvio Micali, Chen, Jing +1 · 1 voice
Computer Science · #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #Distributed #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Parallel #and Cluster Computing (cs.DC) #cs.CR #cs.DC
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1607.01341
arxiv published 2016/07/05 · arxiv updated 2017/05/26
A public ledger is a tamperproof sequence of data that can be read and augmented by everyone. Public ledgers have innumerable and compelling uses. They can secure, in plain sight, all kinds of transactions ---such as titles, sales, and payments--- in the exact order in which they occur. Public ledgers not only curb corruption, but also enable very sophisticated applications ---such as cryptocurrencies and smart contracts. They stand to revolutionize the way a democratic society operates. As currently implemented, however, they scale poorly and cannot achieve their potential. Algorand is a truly democratic and efficient way to implement a public ledger. Unlike prior implementations based on proof of work, it requires a negligible amount of computation, and generates a transaction history that will not "fork" with overwhelmingly high probability. Algorand is based on (a novel and super fast) message-passing Byzantine agreement. For concreteness, we shall describe Algorand only as a money platform.