[Cryptography] More efficient block-chain ledger: Micali's "Algorand" ?

[Henry Baker]

FYI --

https://www.arxiv.org/abs/1607.01341

https://www.arxiv.org/pdf/1607.01341.pdf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xauku8XWoSE

(ignore first 14.5 minutes out of 57.5 total minutes)

ALGORAND: The Efficient and Democratic Ledger

Silvio Micali

(Submitted on 5 Jul 2016 (v1), last revised 16 Nov 2016 (this version, v7))

Algorand is a truly decentralized, new, and secure way to manage a shared ledger.  Unlike prior approaches based on {\em proof of work}, it requires a negligible amount of computation, and generates a transaction history that does not fork with overwhelmingly high probability.  This approach cryptographically selects ---in a way that is provably immune from manipulations, unpredictable until the last minute, but ultimately universally clear--- a set of verifiers in charge of constructing a block of valid transactions.  This approach applies to any way of implementing a shared ledger via a tamper-proof sequence of blocks, including traditional blockchains. This paper also presents more efficient alternatives to blockchains, which may be of independent interest.

Algorand significantly enhances all applications based on a public ledger: payments, smart contracts, stock settlement, etc.  But, for concreteness, we shall describe it only as a money platform. 

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Micali seems to have substantially improved the Bitcoin blockchain for public ledger purposes.

What do you think?