MIT’s Ford Professor of Engineering and one of the world’s top cryptographers Silvio Micali recently published a paper called ALGORAND The Efficient and Democratic Ledger where he lays out a groundbreaking new vision of a decentralized and secure way to manage a shared ledger that provides a beautifully elegant solution to the Byzantine General’s problem.
Micali, the recipient of the Turing Award (in computer science), of the Goedel Prize (in theoretical computer science) and the RSA prize (in cryptography) has developed a new approach to proof of work – which requires a negligible amount of computation, and generates a transaction history that does not fork with overwhelmingly high probability. In fact – over a million years statistically.
The 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 and it applies to any way of implementing a shared ledger via a tamper-proof sequence of blocks, including traditional Blockchains.
According to Micali, best known for his fundamental early work on public-key cryptosystems, pseudorandom functions, digital signatures, oblivious transfer, secure multiparty computation, and co-invention of zero-knowledge proofs – there are much more efficient alternatives to current Blockchains.
And the basis for his solution is taking a totally different tack in the process of building a block. He noted that the idea was first seeded to him by a friend but he added that many of the Magistracies in Florence were elected by lottery.
He calls it cryptographic certation.
http://www.the-[Suspicious link removed]/2017/01/05/move-bitcoin-mit-cryptographer-silvio-micali-public-ledger-algorand-future-blockchain/
note the missing part is the world blockchain DOT com