Summary
- Algorand is new, replacement blockchain proposal to replace BitCoin and improve on the early technical issues
- I attended IEEE sponsored a presentation on Apr 5 by MIT Professor Silvio Micali attended by around 100 mostly technical people at MIT. The audience was generally impressed and only asked clarifying questions. There were no questions that were highly skeptical nor did I meet people who were
- Algorand aims to address many of the BitCoin issues of scalability, security, poor governance,
- Part of the core concept is an assumption that most actors are honest
- Algorand is a startup funded with $4M from Pillar and USV
- Paul’s view: this is worth watching to see feedback from the community and to understand the limits when it starts being built as it seemed too good to be true.
- Multiple presentations are on YouTube about Algorand
Notes
- Keys features of a distributed ledger
- Readable by all
- Writeable by all
- Tamperproof
- Good for
- Notarization and storage
- Ordering of chãos
- Disintermediation
- Transatlantic use manual escrow. Blockchain with smart contract (conditional statement
- Payments and cryptocurrencies
- Bitcoin vs Algorand: disagreement in on implementation, not core concept of
- Bitcoin uses eventual consensus via proof of work
- Proof of work: mining
- Bitcoin technical problems
- A massive amount of electricity
- The exogenous concentration of power in miners, and therefore corruptible because of concentration and low margin business
- 3 mining pools control Bitcoin
- 2 mining pools control Ethereum
- Concentration power is antithetical to goals of a blockchain
- Exogenous vulnerability – miners go bankrupt
- Scalability
- Unclear if BitCoin supports 100M users
- Ambiguity because of forks (two miners solving at the same time)
- Long true latency
- SECURITY?
- Not against network attacks
- Algorand
- overview
- No forks
- No proof of works
- Use Byzantine Agreement
- Main idea: message-passing Byzantine agreement
- Main assumption: the honest majority of money
- Advantages
- Trivial computation: no miners
- True decentralization: a single class of users
- Finality of payments (no forks)
- Scalability