Alternative blockchains, randomness, economics, and other research topics

Contents

• Randomness
• Alternative blockchains, consensus protocols and projects
• Economics
• Time

Randomness

Context: full PoS with Casper CBC and sharding will require a verifiable randomness function that is secure and decentralized, in order to randomly select and assign validators, shuffle notaries, and select collation/block proposers. Such a VRF is an ongoing topic of research, and is yet to be specified and implemented.

• Sharding Fork Choice rule PoC with RANDAO and more info, 2018 May 1
• Vitalik's blog post on Randomness with RANDAO preferred
• RANDAO++ plus an implementation of it with RNGesus
• A random beacon as used by Dfinity although note that BLS is prone to 51% attacks while RANDAO++ isn't.
• James' tweet thread analysing Dfinity's BLS randomness beacon in comparison to RANDAO.
• ethresear.ch post: PoSW random beacon. Here is a critique by Vitalik on Gitter.
• the blockhash, generated via PoW, e.g. Ethash. You could use the blockhash as a preimage to hash functions e.g. in RANDAO.
• https://ethresear.ch/t/rng-exploitability-analysis-assuming-pure-randao-based-main-chain/1825
• RANDAO exploitability analysis results

Alternative blockchains, consensus protocols and projects

Moved to https://github.com/elastos/Elastos.ELA.SideChain.ETH/wiki/Scaling-projects-and-proposals-and-other-crypto-infrastructure-projects.

Economics

• http://radicalmarkets.com
• https://vitalik.ca/
• http://arimaa.com/money - Sound Money Without Commodities

Time

• https://ethresear.ch/search?q=clock
• Universal Hash Time