MIT
Abstract: A public ledger is a tamper proof 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.
Biography: Silvio Micali received his Laurea in Mathematics from the University of Rome, and his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley. Since 1983 he has been on the MIT faculty.
Silvio’s research interests are cryptography, zero knowledge, pseudo-random generation, secure protocols, mechanism design, and distributed ledgers.
Silvio has received the Turing Award in computer science, the Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science, and the RSA prize in cryptography. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
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