Democoin: A Publicly Verifiable and Jointly Serviced Cryptocurrency [pdf]

eprint.iacr.org

17 points·kushti··6 comments

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Proof of work is replaced with lottery which determines a set of verifiers.

Choosing verifiers is based on external oracle (e.g. average temperature for group of cities).

Prevention of sybil attacks is proposed in three forms:

* annual fee enforced by the system

* proof of stake

* external authority

Paper itself is full of weasel words. "Very", "efficient" etc are repeated over and over. Also, 3 patent applications.

At first glance it does not look like an improvement over Bitcoin, because it does not work.

It's not improvement, but the replacement. Could be useful for some use cases at least. Also, there are different implementations possible, so it's pretty reckless to say it "does not work".

It's the most innovative proposal in the blockchain tech for last months, but more investigation is needed definitely.

Anyone care to tl;dr this or give a comparison with bitcoin?

Most of this stuff is way over my head.

I'm about to go to bed, but I'll definitely give it a read in the morning.

No multi GB blockchain and capable of supporting more than a pitiful 650 transactions a minute. Basically works by randomly electing verifiers and assuming that the majority elected are going to be honest enough.

So how is that supposed to work?

If some percent of the nodes are malicious, that means sometimes an election will include a majority of them and they will create a false transaction.

This means only some transactions are trustworthy, not all.

Risky business, literally.

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