Silvio Micali: ALGORAND: The True Public Ledger

ABSTRACT

A public ledger is a tamperproof sequence of data that can be read and augmented by everyone. Shared public ledgers stand to revolutionize the way a democratic society operates. They secure all kinds of traditional transactions –such as payments, asset transfers, titling– in the exact order in which they occur; and enable totally new transactions ---such as cryptocurrencies and smart contracts. They can remove intermediaries and usher in a new paradigm for trust. As currently implemented, however, public ledgers cannot achieve their enormous potential.

Algorand is a quite alternative, truly democratic, and very 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.