Digital Currency

By Othman Darwish Since the invention of Bitcoin cryptocurrency and its underlying blockchain technology, a new era of asset digitization emerge. By asset we mean anything could be owned, has a value, and could be transferred from one party to another. Asset digitization aims to provide proof of the ownership, bookkeeping of value, and streamline electronic exchanges.  Electronic transfer of asset done traditionally by the help of centralized and trusted bookkeeper/asset registrar, here the central authority acts as notary service to guarantee the validity and finality of the ownership transfer. As a result, a central entity would maintain a ledger ( bookkeeper ) of assets transfer transactions,  and keep maintaining its valid and final state. With the emergence of blockchain technology, this game changed forever; the needs for a central party that acts as a trusted intermediary to execute ownership transfer of an asset is eliminated, and replaced by blockchain secur...

Authors: Lamine SANO & Othman Darwish Abstract In distributed systems, with multiple computing nodes, consensus is a fundamental concept that aims to achieving system reliability, with the fact that some nodes may fail, malfunction or provide malicious information. This conflict in the provided information, requires a mechanism where all nodes agree on some state; this process is called consensus. The problem was first formulated by Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak and Marshall Pease in their 1982 paper, "The Byzantine Generals Problem," [1]  and proved then to be unsolvable. Since then,  different algorithms were designed and developed to try and solve this problem under various assumptions. The advent of Bitcoin, and its underlying innovating blockchain technology provided a practical and radical mechanism to solve this problem and make it possible to transfer information in an entirely decentralized and trustless environment. This paper, will briefly explore th...