The biomimetic mechanism is incorporated into a permissionless blockchain protocol, Key Retroactivity Network Consensus (“KRNC”), which delivers ~40,000 times the security and speed of today’s decentralized ledgers. KRNC allows the fiat money that the public already owns to be upgraded with cryptographic inflation protection, eliminating the problems inherent in bootstrapping new currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
The paper includes two independently significant contributions to the literature. First, it replaces the non-structural axioms invoked in prior work with a new formal method for reasoning about trust, liveness, and safety from first principles. Second, it demonstrates how two previously overlooked exploits — book-prize attacks and pseudo-transfer attacks — collectively undermine the security guarantees of all prior permissionless ledgers.
Category / Keywords: cryptographic protocols / electronic commerce and payment; distributed cryptography Date: received 23 Sep 2019, last revised 5 Oct 2020 Contact author: clint at krnc io Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation Note: 104 pages Version: 20201006:040142 (All versions of this report) Short URL: ia.cr/2019/1088