An Efficient Distributed Currency

Given that it is probably impossible to create a decentralised currency[2], what’s the next best thing? I claim that it is a distributed currency: one that relies on a distributed central authority. In this case, the interesting questions are how one builds a distributed central authority, and how one chooses the participants. I explore these questions and outline sketch solutions. 2 Required Reading I will use the terminology and ideas already defined in [2]. I will not assume the existence of an efficient unbounded agreement protocol. 3 Building a Distributed Central Authority We need an efficient way to agree the total state of the system (that is, what coins exist, who has possession of them and the transaction history1). First, we view the state as a map of coins to purses. This can be represented as a list of coins, each with the number of the purse it is in. I call this a snapshot