How to mimic Nakamoto's design via proof-of-stake

Bitcoin has proven to be very successful. The Bitcoin blockchain is backed up by a large-scale network of miners via proof-of-work mechanism. Unfortunately, these miners consume huge amount of non-recyclable resources (electricity and computing hardware). To address this issue, alternative blockchain constructions via proof-of-stake mechanism have been proposed. Unfortunately, those proposals either lack of security analysis or cannot scale to a large network of nodes in the open network setting where new players can safely join the blockchain protocol.

In this talk, I will explain iChing, the first scalable proof-of-stake blockchain in the open setting. We show that our blockchain protocol can achieve several important security properties including common prefix, chain quality, chain growth, and chain soundness.

Related paper can be found at http://eprint.iacr.org/2017/656