38 ms·
A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency
- sschueller 8y agoWhere can I get the source code?
- salvadormon 8y agoI don't know if the source code has been released, but I think the company funding the research has published an API: https://developer.algorand.org/docs/installing-mac https://developer.algorand.org/docs/installing-mac
- mLuby 8y agoHow can it both claim decentralized trust and be closed-source?
- justicz 8y ago(I work for Algorand) The project will be open-sourced prior to the public launch of the network.
- tamalesfan 8y agoWhen will the launch happen?
- SkyMarshal 8y agoWhen it’s ready.
- api 8y agoDoes this just reduce join bandwidth? If so it's a minor improvement since the real problems with scalability are transaction size and proof of work cost per TX.
- striking 8y ago> With traditional cryptocurrencies, users compete to solve equations that validate blocks, with the first to solve the equations receiving funds. As the network scales, this slows down transaction processing times. Algorand uses a “proof-of-stake” concept to more efficiently verify blocks and better enable new users join. For every block, a representative verification “committee” is selected. Users with more money — or stake — in the network have higher probability of being selected. To join the network, users verify each certificate, not every transaction. Seems they've moved to a Proof of Stake solution, rather than a Proof of Work. Ethereum was meant to switch to it, iirc, but never did.
- DennisP 8y agoEthereum is still planning the switch. They've combined proof of stake with sharding for scalability, and the combined system is being rolled out in three phases, the first of them this year. There's a complete spec for the first phase, and teams building implementations.
- tonyjstark 8y agoExactly my thought. Joining is just a one-time problem, staying up to date and mining are the big energy and scalability killer. I somehow assumed that Bitcoin already has some functionality (inherited from Merkle Trees) in place that you don't have to download the whole chain?
- salvadormon 8y agoFrom the conclusions I've read in the paper I understand that this new cryptocurrency reduces the join bandwidth and blockchain size. https://people.csail.mit.edu/nickolai/papers/leung-vault-eprint.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/nickolai/papers/leung-vault-epr...
- gervase 8y agoThe scalability problem is fortunately amenable to piecemeal solutions. Some research teams will focus on validation (i.e. novel proof of ____ approaches), others will focus on block propagation, some on bootstrapping (like the OP), novel hash structures for transaction aggregation, etc. It would be difficult to come out with a new approach that simultaneously advanced the state of the art in every possible scalability dimension. Each individual approach might give a 2-10X improvement on that particular aspect, but it also means that the "bottleneck" keeps shifting, and trending towards scalability. Source: I'm an academic blockchain researcher.
- akerro 8y agoThere are a few cryptocurrencies out there on market and usable with big communities that use 99% less energy and data that bitcoin
- whytaka 8y agoI should do my own research but I’d appreciate if you can name a few of them.
- mihaifm 8y agoI would name Nano, a very underrated cryptocurrency. Uses DPoS (Delegated Proof of Stake) instead of Proof of Work, so it doesn't do mining, also it has zero fees and minimal transaction times. I've ran a full node for some time to support the network, the whole blockchain size was about 5GB, but the downside of zero transaction fees is that there is less incentive for people to run full nodes. I stopped mine out of boredom when the market crashed. Unfortunately the market is so full of overhyped projects and buzzwords that people are no longer interested in something that just works.
- throwaway415415 8y agoIf no fees, what are the incentives to accept transactions in a block?
- solean 8y agoAlso, what stops you from spamming the network?
- mihaifm 8y agoI've had concerns in this area as well, as far as I know the team performed some stress tests and the network can do 100+ transactions per second, maybe more. There is also a small computation that the hardware needs to perform before sending the transaction, which is only a small guard against spam but pretty useful.
- viach 8y agoInteresting, will they accept tuition payments in it?
- dpflan 8y agoThat could be an interesting first use case: accepting partial or full tuition payment or maybe student fees or club/activity fees with this?
- viach 8y agoYup, that could become big - Facebook started first in academias and first users were students.
- dpflan 8y agoAgreed, college students can be a good target user-base. Making payment easier/simpler/"more futuristic/cooler" could lead to buy-in/usage. Just recall how it was to interact with your university registrar/bursar...
- dmitriid 8y agoAssuming they do, what use would they have for this coin afterwards? Can they convert these payments into salaries for staff? Equipment for laboratories? Repairs? etc. etc.
- root_axis 8y agoWhat would be gained from converting money into cryptocurrency to buy something you could just buy with money?
- emptyfile 8y agoIs data usage a big problem for Bitcoin?
- akhilcacharya 8y agoIt was for me for a while - I refused to download the entire blockchain. With that said, there have long been mitigations for end users with local wallets.
- fabianfabian 8y agoNot really. The biggest problem is getting more of the participants of the network bootstrapped with a fully validating node. Most people right now choose to rely on others instead which defeats the purpose of Bitcoin and makes the network overall insecure.
- FabHK 8y agoThe chain is, what, 200 GB now?
- CyberDildonics 8y agoIt isn't even close to a big problem. Better design is great, but anyone who can watch youtube can still sync to any current cryptocurrency chain. Most people never will though, since there isn't much trust involved in using a chain on a server.
- ponyous 8y agoYeah, I can't run a node without 200GB+ of free storage space. No way I do it on the phone for example.
- polyomino 8y agoYou can bootstrap a node without storing the blockchain. You have to download it though to build up and validate the unspent transaction outputs which are < 1 gb iirc.
- drexlspivey 8y ago
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- malloreon 8y agoI have long wondered how cryptocurrency fans would answer the question: ‘Would you be happy if the crypto-utopia you bring up happens in the next 10 years, and all value is stored/transacted through a cryptocurrency, but it was a coin that you do not possess now, nor could you transfer any of you current currencies into it?’ Say tomorrow someone releases the one true coin, but no one notices. All other cryptocurrencies drop to zero value, then a crypto miracle occurs - the one true coin is uncovered and almost overnight becomes the defacto monetary standard. Would crypto fans be satisfied? This is a long way of asking: do you want cryptocurrency to succeed if you knew that you could not profit from it doing so?
- emilfihlman 8y agoExactly. Cryptocurrencies are a pipe dream unless they can be effectively and fairly distributed first.
- kakarot 8y agoCare to link those two unrelated concepts together a bit better? Money isn't effectively and fairly distributed and it's obviously not a pipe dream.
- ForHackernews 8y agoMoney is more fairly distributed than cryptocurrencies. Credit Suisse found that 97% of bitcoin is held by 4% of addresses (though some may belong to exchanges): http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-97-are-held-by-4-of-addresses-2018-1?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-97-are-held-by-4-of-a...
- atdt 8y agoPaper: http://www.mit.edu/~yossigi/vault.pdf http://www.mit.edu/~yossigi/vault.pdf
- ForHackernews 8y agoIf this kills proof-of-work cryptocurrencies, I'm all for it.
- throwaway415415 8y agoIt is already dying
- naveedi 8y agoFull disclosure: I work on the cryptocurrency in this article, Algorand. There are a lot of questions and speculation here about this paper and Algorand. I would be happy to try an answer them to your satisfaction. Some context may be helpful first, though. This paper is an innovation about one aspect of our technology. Algorand has a very fast consensus mechanism and can add blocks as quickly as the network can deliver them. We become a victim of our success. The blockchain will grow very rapidly. A terabyte a month is possible. The storage issue associated with our performance can quickly become an issue. The Vault paper is focused on solving this and other storage scaling problems. The Algorand pure proof-of-stake blockchain and associated cryptocurrency has many novel innovations aside from Vault. It possesses security and scalability properties beyond what any other blockchain technology allows while still being completely decentralized. Our website, algorand.com, and whitepaper are great places to start to learn more. If you learn best from videos then I suggest you watch Turing award winner and cryptographic pioneer, Silvio Micali, talk about Algorand: https://youtu.be/NykZ-ZSKkxM https://youtu.be/NykZ-ZSKkxM. He is a captivating speaker and the founder of Algorand.
- hart_russell 8y agoHow does the speed and scalability of Algorand compare to something like nano?
- westurner 8y agoAre there reasons that e.g. Bitcoin and Ethereum and Stellar could not implement some of these more performant approaches that Algorand [1] and Vault [2] have developed, published, and implemented? Which would require a hard fork? [1] https://www.algorand.com/ https://www.algorand.com/ [2] https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/117821 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/117821
- throwaway415415 8y agoMy understanding is that PoS approaches follow normal byzantine agreement theory which states that adversaries cannot control more than 1/3rd of the accounts (or money in the case of algorand). You can also delay new blocks more easily. Ethereum is scared or that so they are implementing some hybrid form. Bitcoin is doomed from my perspective, because of the focus on proof of work and the confirmation times. When you realize that algorand is super fast, there is no "confirmation time", and there is no waste in energy to mine, then it is hard to back up any cryptocurrency focusing on proof of work.
- _Kristijan_ 8y agoA "faster, more efficient cryptocurrency" is already in productive operation since 2015. Called "Nano" https://nano.org/en https://nano.org/en
- MuffinFlavored 8y agoCare to elaborate? If this is faster and more efficient, why is it #40 on coinmarketcap.com?
- viivaux 8y agoI can't answer your question, but it is faster and more efficient. I've used it and it works.
- mihaifm 8y agoCoinmarketcap is not to be taken as a standard of quality. I mean Bitconnect used to be in the top 10 before it was exposed as a massive ponzi scheme. https://coinmarketcap.com/historical/20171029/ https://coinmarketcap.com/historical/20171029/ Coinmarketcap just reflects what people invest in at a certain time, it doesn't mean that these investments are rational or are based on highly calculated decisions. A lot of coins in the top 100 are copycats, tokens or just concepts, very few are fully functional products.
- gammateam 8y ago> I mean Bitconnect used to be in the top 10 before it was exposed as a massive ponzi scheme. and after
- jtms 8y agoI haven’t looked yet, but sometimes it can be due to difficulty of acquisition due to lack of exchanges that offer trading pairs for it
- companyhen 8y agoWhat I know of it is Nano uses a DAG rather than Blockchain, similar to IOTA's tangle
- DigiMortal 8y agoI was just thinking on my way to work this morning about crypto - it was so much fun riding the thrill late 2017, excluding the tech, it was an exciting time for many. I crave another crypto boom
- Nuzzerino 8y agoI was in the thick of it and frankly I found it to be pretty cringeworthy to see so many armchair "investment experts" coming out of the woodwork.
- DigiMortal 8y agoWell yes, there was a huge cringe factor. I'd say 99.99% of everyone was the opposite, clueless in the midst of it (In hindsight I made my mistakes as well!) I'm no expert on blockchain, but crypto taught me very very very powerful and insightful investing lessons.
- xiphias2 8y agoAs usual assumptions are much stronger than what Bitcoin has. I'm really sorry about the fact that this currency is voted up so much.
- Vervious 8y agoWell, in some sense that's a good thing. Bitcoin relies on a synchronous network - an honest majority of online miners must be honest. Algorand's safety assumption is stronger - the honest stake need not be "always online", and the system cannot fork even under worst-case asynchrony. As a result I certainly don't trust Bitcoin with anything more than pocket change. I would, on the other hand, put money on Algorand. A Bitcoin attacker could conceivably DOS a handful of honest miners/network relays (given that mining seems pretty centralized), sequester a third of the mining network, and mint money. No matter how much DOS power you have, you cannot mint money on Algorand without a substantial proportion of the stake.
- polyomino 8y agoHogwash. How can a user be sure that the chain is valid if they don't download the transaction set? If users cannot verify the amount of coin in the network this is useless.
- zaphar 8y agoNot usable for certain operations perhaps. But useless? That seems a little extreme.
- drak0n1c 8y agoHedera Hashgraph uses the gossip protocol and simulated voting protocol to do it. It's possible, there are implementations like Hashgraph already doing a distributed ledger without a full blockchain.
- patientplatypus 8y agoCrypto currencies have all seemed like an obscurantist version of hot potato. Either the hash gets too long to calculate effectively or the amount of money at stake means very very smart people will start finding ways to hack the coin (and they will). But basically the deal crypto developers are trying to make with me is to trade US backed dollars for "fun bux". These developers are usually very smart people - often much smarter than I. But I don't like smart. Take US dollars. Little pieces of green paper are very uncomplicated and if anyone starts copying them armed thugs show up at their house to have a very serious discussion. And my corner chemist takes dead presidents on delivery no questions asked.
- smokeyj 8y agoBro have you looked at the source code for the green paper? There's weird ACL rules, double spending, it's backdoored and pre-mined. Trust me, crypto is wayyy simpler to understand.
- DenisM 8y agoThis gets asked often, but in case something changed recently - what are the use cases of cryptocurrencies that are not: - Attempts to side-step the law (however misguided the law is) - Trivial to do using a typical centralized database (e.g. Federal Reserver or VISA) - Tantamount to waiting for a greater fool to buy out the current players I am not looking for answers of the form "well whenever you want to avoid a third party...", I actually want to know what are those cases where you have to avoid a third party, and why. The economist-in-me appreciates that non-legal activities are perfectly capable of both demanding and supporting a novel financial instrument on their own, I only exclude it from my question because it's a rather obvious application and I would like to probe beyond that.
- dantillberg 8y ago> Attempts to side-step the law (however misguided the law is) There are a lot of people in the world that live in places where the law is far more gone than "misguided." For these people, it's not a question of "whether" to side-step the law but "how." You may not care, but they do.
- puranjay 8y agoThese people are already so far removed from the crypto infrastructure that it's a trivial case. People who bring this up are almost always people who have never lived anywhere near real poverty or conflict. Barring individual cases, the vast majority of the world's less privileged have neither the means nor the knowledge to buy crypto in any shape
- scartracs 8y agoDASH and NANO had several initiatives this past year to achieve adoption in Venezuela due to their humanitarian crisis. It was small, but there were some good results especially by DASH if we believe the media they produced. There was a movement to donate DASH/NANO and get merchants to accept it in exchange for goods. All merchants need is a sticker that displays their QR code and a terminal that can confirm the transaction, which can be done by any smartphone/tablet/computer/IOT with minimal effort. Keep in mind, this happened while DASH and NANO are quite unknown and all crypto was in a bear market, meaning there were few people following the projects that could donate and promote the events. The hard part is not adoption within poverty-stricken nations, rather adoption in developed nations with complicated tax codes and lack of incentives for merchants to invest in more payment processing tech is the true challenge ahead.
- flyGuyOnTheSly 8y agoThis sounds extremely similar to Grin project imho... which was just released last month.
- companyhen 8y agoGrin is PoW and this seems to be PoS though.
- shadowfiend 8y agoAnother approach to similar problems is Coda: https://codaprotocol.com https://codaprotocol.com .
- Ar-Curunir 8y agoCoda takes an entirely different cryptographic approach than Algorand. Different layers of solutions.
- shadowfiend 8y agoIndeed, thus “another approach” :) There are several different approaches trying to tackle this same problem in the space, some further along than others, and typically all with different tradeoffs and at different points in the system. e.g. Lightning is arguably addressing some of these issues as well, but at a different point---on top of Bitcoin, rather than instead of. I called out Coda because it's both an independent system and aimed at a very similar set of issues, but it's absolutely a different approach. Figured it might be of interest to folks who were looking at this article.
- throwaway415415 8y agoNo it doesn't. Coda can work with Algorand's byzantine agreement protocol.
- Ar-Curunir 8y agoSure, but Coda targets a different scalability bottleneck.
- throwaway415415 8y agoHence why it can work with algorand.
- arisAlexis 8y agodo we want governments and politicians to use transparent money that can be tracked? hell yes
- tylersmith 8y agoThis is interesting. It sounds similar to the non-interactive proof of proof of work system that uses "super blocks" of excessive work to prove that blocks in between must have occurred. https://nipopows.com/ https://nipopows.com/
- thesausageking 8y agoThere's no free lunch. These gains come with a tradeoff in security. Bitcoin's proof of work which uses an algorithm and processing power to secure it. Vault/Algorand throws out PoW and replaces it that with a pure "proof of stake" system that requires 2/3rds of the currency's value is held by honest actors. In addition, if the network were ever to go offline, there isn't a deterministic way to get it back online.
- EthanHeilman 8y ago>In addition, if the network were ever to go offline, there isn't a deterministic way to get it back online. I haven't heard anyone say this about Algorand. Can you provide more details? Lets say a bug causes all the Algorand nodes to crash. After a patch is released 90% of the network comes back online. What prevents the selected users from arriving at consensus over the next block?
- thesausageking 8y agoIf the network goes down completely, as it's coming back up, groups of nodes will start adding blocks before all of the other nodes are back online. When connectivity is completely restored, you end up with different parallel chains, each of which thinks it's the main chain. With Bitcoin, there's a simple, deterministic way to decide which chain to trust: the one which has had the most work done it. With Algorand, it's not clear what would happen.
- justicz 8y ago(I work for Algorand) This is false. The BFT protocol that Algorand uses guarantees that each round may have exactly one block (up to our security assumptions with regard to honest stake); this is one of the protocol’s “safety” guarantees. In the case that a large number of participating nodes crash, the network will refuse to produce a block until a sufficient amount of stake begins participating again. Nodes that fall behind can use the standard catchup protocol — the one that nodes new to the network make use of — to pick up where they left off.
- scabarott 8y agoHadn't heard of vault or Algorand before, but woah, what a team of heavy hitters: Micali, Goldwasser, Andrew Lo, Kenneth Rogoff, Herlihy etc. basically a who's who in CS, Cryptography, Econ & finance. If any group will do crypto right then at least on paper it would look like this team
- throwaway415415 8y agoYup. It's a shame that HN isn't willing to talk about the interesting new research instead of debating around the same philosophical discussions.
- MusaTheRedGuard 8y agoIt's been pretty telling to watch sentiment on HN towards crypto slowly shift from complete disgust to mild curiousity
- throwaway415415 8y agoWhen you look at the big cryptographers behind vault and algorand you understand why.
- jtms 8y agoWhen moon?
- HashBasher 8y agoYet another PoS shitcoin... The validation of a cryptocurrency must burn real world asset!
- throwaway415415 8y agoKlol
- SkyMarshal 8y agoI wouldn’t call Algorand a shitcoin. There’s Bitcoin, altcoins and shitcoins. Altcoins have credible teams exploring alternative architectures, which is fine. And yes current wisdom is there’s no free lunch and you have to spend some resource to gain decentralized security. But it’s worth having credible altcoins exploring if that rule can, like Neo in the matrix, be bent or broken with some clever crypto or other CS. ;)
- SkyMarshal 8y ago>In experiments, Vault reduced the bandwidth for joining its network by 99 percent compared to Bitcoin and 90 percent compared to Ethereum, which is considered one of today’s most efficient cryptocurrencies. Ethereum is not considered one of today’s most efficient cryptocurrencies, not remotely. One of the most full-featured perhaps, but not efficient. Not even Bitcoin is since the invention of the MimbleWimble protocol, and more recently the even more efficient Coda Protocol. The real efficiency comparison is against those two. https://grin-tech.org https://grin-tech.org https://codaprotocol.com https://codaprotocol.com
- throwaway415415 8y agoThis is true. I would be interested in knowing the difference in approaches between vault and coda.
- dlubarov 8y agoCODA uses cryptographic arguments to demonstrate that a block is valid (including ancestor blocks). I haven't read much of the Vault paper, but it sounds like they're having users vote (with weights proportional to their stake) on whether blocks are valid. If someone corrupted enough voters, they could theoretically create a "Vault certificate" for an invalid block (e.g. one which spends the same coins several times), and other nodes would accept it. That wouldn't be possible with CODA, unless someone broke their cryptographic primitives.
- evanevan 8y agoHi, I'm one of the founders of Coda - In Coda we use zero knowledge proofs to stand in for downloading / checking the blockchain. This means you get the identical computation to normal blockchain syncing, but in only the size of the zero knowledge proof and your account, which ends up being both constant and ~20kb. Which makes a big difference if you want to use Coda from a phone or browser. Check out this video if you want to understand more of the tech behind it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWVGATxEB6M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWVGATxEB6M And feel free to ask any other questions as well!
- good-idea 8y agoI'm shocked and disheartened by how infrequently environmental concerns are brought up when discussing crypto. Proof of Work vs Proof of Stake, security, storage size - these are problems for the network and those that want to see it become a real part of our economy. (I am one of those) But the amount of energy being used to mine bitcoin is a real problem - it's not just a technical challenge (like the problems above). This is something that literally affects every human being. Of the 203 comments (at the time I am posting this), there are only two uses of the word "environment". One of these is about the "regulatory environment". Let's say Bitcoin, Ethereum, or another coin achieves an economic value & level of efficiency that makes mining an accessible investment for low-income people. Instead of server farms in Iceland, mining would be done by millions of people around the world. Some of the energy used for this would be renewable - but plenty of this is going to be coming from coal. In that sense, the coin would create an economic incentive to pollute (there are plenty of these already), and there's no way to regulate that kind of decentralized network. (That's the whole point) My favorite summary of crypto is something along the lines of: leaving your car running while it solves sudoku puzzles in exchange for drugs. The drugs part isn't as relevant anymore, but the rest is. I'm not here with an answer. There are many problems that I think crypto can solve and I'm glad it is something on the horizon. But we need to talk about the environment.
- throwaway415415 8y agoThere is no energy waste with Algorand's pos. It doesn't use bitcoin's pow. So yeah the environement doesn't matter here.
- etherael 8y agoNo, we don't, because what it replaces is already much more energy intensive than it.
- r1b 8y agoI feel the same way about the amount of energy used to serve advertisements & send marketing emails.
- 8y ago
- beagle3 8y agoBut it’s still proof of work, right? If it has a ratchet like bitcoin, it becomes uneconomical to mine at some point. I think proof of space-time (Bram Cohen’s and spacemesh.io’s currencies are examples) is a better way forward.
- ksec 8y agoUp to 99% more efficient are meaningless number. Just tell me how much electricity is require for each transaction. How much is required for minning, Maximum possible transaction per second. etc. I still believe in Blockchain, one way or another for many possible use case once all the technical / unit cost problems are solved. But I remain extremely sceptical of Cryptocurrency.
- legohead 8y agoUntil the 51% attack problem is "solved" I can't take any cryptocurrency for serious. You can't use the word "secure" with this attack vector being possible.
- jki275 8y agoWhat do you believe about the "51% attack problem"? It's a very overblown concept.
- legohead 8y agohttps://twitter.com/etherchain_org/status/1082329360948969472 https://twitter.com/etherchain_org/status/108232936094896947...
- throwaway415415 8y agoThere is no 51% attack in PoS system. Rather there is a more than 1/3rd attacker problem.
- kragen 8y agoThis sounds pretty similar to the benefits of MimbleWimble, the design behind Grin (and another earlier system whose name I forget). Grin recently "went live" in the sense that now there's a network that isn't the testnet.
- throwaway415415 8y agoNot true
- drexlspivey 8y agoHow is that not true? In grin you only have to download the block headers and only the last 5000 blocks (called horizon) for a full sync. Bandwidth saving is even greater than 99%.
- eruci 8y agoI propose a "proof of workout" cryptocurrency. It will make miners fitter with no cost to the environment.
- bouncycastle 8y agoFrom the article, it sounds like it uses sharding and pruning to scale. Both are nothing new, pruning has been implemented in many crypto-currencies already, sharding is currently an area of intense development. Quote "Vault, a cryptocurrency that lets users join the network by downloading only a fraction of the total transaction data. It also incorporates techniques that delete empty accounts that take up space"
- beaker52 8y agoNano is a crypto that already has some of these qualities and is already brought to market. https://nano.org/en https://nano.org/en Disclaimer: I own some nano
- 0x262d 8y agocryptocurrency is and always has been a useless technology in the best tradition of useless technologies: a combination of libertarian aesthetics and a pyramid scheme. the complaints people have with state currency are basic political problems that cryptocurrencies are not going to resolve. the basic feature that gives state currencies reliability is the backing of the state. without that, and states will never want to give that to cryptocurrencies, they will always be commodities with no stability and no real use value. and all the people who have bought in already will need to sell to a new generation of suckers, regardless of if they conceptualize it like that or not.
- z3t4 8y agoIt needs to be simple enough so that a layman can understand, implement and use it.
- ilaksh 8y agoIt seems most of this is already covered by Ethereum, but Ethereum also has much more in the way of functionality and already has very significant resources behind it. Can we incorporate the vaulting concept also into Ethereum? Since it seems like they are trying to steal their thunder I wonder if someone from that camp will come out with a reason vaulting can't work.
- xtat 8y agoLove MIT but truthfully I don't find this is that different from what folks are already implementing.
- throwaway415415 8y agoWhat folks?
- scotchmi_st 8y agoThis seems like just another proof-of-stake currency, albeit with some niceties like sharding and the 'vaulting' mechanism. It'd have all of the issues with a proof-of-stake currency, such as leading to small clique with most of the coins in the system, who get to decide who gets their transactions signed. Can anyone see anything more here or is that all there is?
- netsa 8y agoAnyone still believe this shit after the bitcoin pyramid?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- CydeWeys 8y agoWow, I'm pretty disappointed that the entire MIT website isn't secure. What's going on over there? Meanwhile, my random state school has a fully secure https website. Security is of critical importance to cryptocurrencies, and it's hard to take anyone seriously on that subject if they can't even get the fundamentals of web encryption right.
- throwaway415415 8y agoWow wow wow
- WMCRUN 8y agoVault is based on proof of stake, which is much less energy intensive than PoW...
- amelius 8y ago> Design reduces by 99 percent the data users need to join the network and verify transactions. Is this enough? I'm guessing that if bitcoin would grow to support even 1% of global payments, that 99% performance increase is not going to cut it.
- ique 8y agoSo basically they re-invented light clients and checkpointing?
- damip 8y agoHere is also a lesser known open source project that demonstrates the use of proof-of-stake for energy efficiency, combined with a fixed-width directed acyclic grah with transaction sharding for parallelization. Furthermore, "final" and "stale" blocks are dynamically forgotten to increase storage efficiency. It achieves 10,000 tx/s on chain and transaction times below 1 minute. https://blockclique.io/ https://blockclique.io/
- tim333 8y agoThere's also Credits which claims to be the fastest chain at 0.1 second transaction times and to be capable of over 1 million transactions a sec. Though it you run it that fast you use a lot of disk space. https://credits.com/ https://credits.com/
- 5partan 8y agoIt seems the MIT lives in a world were only Bitcoin and Ethereum exist. Seriously, who besides Vitalik Buterin himself considers Ethereum as one of today’s most efficient cryptocurrencies?
- jhh 8y agoCould existing Coins switch their network to the new technology or is there something fundamentally in the way of that?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- rkagerer 8y agoSetting aside the giant environmental debate, does anyone here actually have an opinion of this new cryptocurrency? e.g. Do you think the advancements are novel, or just a mashup of ideas already tried in other blockchains? Do any other cryptos do the "breadcrumb" shortcut?
- mungojelly 8y agothey're like halfway to inventing SPV :/