Silvio Micali: ALGORAND: The True Public Ledger

Speaker: Silvio Micali, MIT

Date: Tuesday, February 07, 2017

Time: 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM Note: all times are in the Eastern Time Zone

Refreshments: 3:45 PM

Public: Yes

Location: Patil/Kiva G449

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Host: Aleksander Madry

Contact: Deborah Goodwin, 617.324.7303, dlehto@csail.mit.edu

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Reminders to: seminars@csail.mit.edu, theory-seminars@csail.mit.edu

Reminder Subject: TALK: 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.

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Created by Deborah Goodwin at Wednesday, January 25, 2017 at 11:33 AM.