Professors From 7 US Colleges, Including MIT and Stanford, Have Teamed Up To Design a Cryptocurrency Capable Of Processing Thousands of Transactions a Second (fortune.com)

Some of the brightest minds in America are pooling their brain power to create a cryptocurrency that's designed to do what Bitcoin has proved incapable of: processing thousands of transactions a second. From a report: Professors from seven U.S. colleges including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley have teamed up to create a digital currency that they hope can achieve speeds Bitcoin users can only dream of without compromising on its core tenant of decentralization. The Unit-e, as the virtual currency is called, is the first initiative of Distributed Technology Research, a non-profit foundation formed by the academics with backing from hedge fund Pantera Capital Management LP to develop decentralized technologies.

Bitcoin is the original cryptocurrency and the first payment network to allow parties to transact directly without needing to trust each another or to rely on a central authority. Yet, while it has built a following among developers, anarchists and speculators, mainstream adoption remains elusive. That's in no small part the product of its design, where inbuilt restrictions have constrained its performance and scalability and, as a result, reduced its usefulness as an everyday unit of payment, DTR said in a research paper. The academics are designing a virtual coin they expect will be able to process transactions faster than even Visa.

Comments

So, like Ripple but with no users?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Ripple is already the most-used cryptocurrency for cross-border payments (DAG-based) with years of R&D and partnerships with major banks and corporations around the world.

It'll be a steep hill to climb to get something out of the Ivory Tower to compete. This would have been cutting edge six years ago, though.

Re: What?

[phantomfive]

All they really need to do is decrease the likelihood of an attack. 51% is terribly low. It needs to be closer to 60-70%

Double spending with bitcoin is harder than just getting 51% of the available CPU power. For it to be effective, you also need to find someone willing to sell you something in exchange for bitcoin, something valuable enough to cover the cost of that much CPU power. Then you need to get them to just give it to you like that, without using an escrow service, without waiting for the payment to settle. Then you need to be sure that this person will not try to get revenge, either through the court or through a hitman. This is a rich person, someone who can afford a hitman.

Remember that the 51% doesn't allow you to steal people's money: it only allows you rollback transactions that already happened. You still need to figure out how to execute the second half of the scam.