Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a new cryptocurrency that significantly reduces the amount of data users need to connect to the network and justifies transactions — up to 99 percent compared to the now popular cryptocurrency. This means that the network can be changed.
Cryptocurrencies, like popular bitcoin, are blockchain-based networks, which combine financial registries into separate barrier chains, each containing trading data. These networks are interchangeable, meaning there are no banks or institutions to manage currencies and scales, so users are grouped to store and verify transactions.
However, the distribution of power leads to problems with scalability. To join the cryptocurrency, new users must download and store all the data on each of the hundreds of thousands of barriers. They also need to store these data to use the service and help verify the transaction. This makes the process slow or unstable for some.
In a paper presented at the symposium on network security and distributed systems in the coming months, MIT researchers offer a vault, a cryptocurrency that allows users to connect to the network by downloading small portions of General Data. It also includes empty account extraction technology that takes a lot of space and allows authentication using the latest transaction data that is distributed and distributed across the network, reducing the requirements for storing and processing individual user data.
During the experiment, vault reduced bandwidth for network connectivity by 99 percent compared to bitcoin and 90 percent compared to Ethereum, which is considered one of the most effective cryptocurrencies today. It is important to note that the vault still ensures that all nodes justify all transactions, providing the same rigorous security as their current counterparts.
Today there are many cryptocurrencies, but it comes with bottlenecks connected to access systems for users and storage information. The general purpose here is to allow cryptocurrencies to circulate well for the growing number of users, said co-author Derek Leung, a Ph.D. student at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (Cecil).
Leung has joined the work of researchers Cecil Yossi Gilad and Nikolai Zheldovich, who are also professors in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; and Adam Sul's newly graduated '18.
Jumping on barriers
Each block in the cryptocurrency network has a timestamp, its location in the blockchain, a string of numbers and letters of fixed length, called a "hash", that is the definition of the block. Each new block contains a hash of the previous block in the blockchain. Storage barriers also contain up to 10,000 transactions — or 10 megabytes of data — that users must verify. The layout of the blockchain, and in particular, the hash chain, ensures that the attacker will not be able to access unnoticed blocks.
New users access the cryptocurrency network, or "bootstrapping", downloading all the data from previous exchanges to make sure they are safe and updated. For example, to join bitcoin last year, a user downloaded 500,000 blocks with a total of 150 gigabytes. The user must also maintain the balance of all accounts to verify new users and ensure that the user has enough money to complete the transaction. Storage conditions have become important as bitcoin has more than 22 million accounts.
Researchers have built their systems over a new cryptocurrency network called an algorithm, created by Silvio Micali, Professor Ford of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which is reliable, decentralized, and more flexible than other cryptocurrencies.
With traditional cryptocurrencies, users compete for equity solutions that justify barriers, and the first to solve equity is to earn money. According to the network schedule, this slows the processing time of the transaction. The algorithm uses the concept of" stake proof " to verify barriers more efficiently and allows new users to access them. The certificate of "commission" is selected by each barrier. Users with more money — or stakes in the network are more likely to be selected. To join the network, the user checks all the certificates, but not all transactions.
But each barrier contains basic information to check the certificate before it, which means that the new user must start from the first barrier of the chain with the certificate and verify each of them in the same order, which can take a long time. time. To speed up the process, researchers provide each new certificate with authentication information based on an obstacle with a few hundred or 1000 obstacles behind it-the so-called "bread path.""When a new user enters, he maps the first navigation route to the 1000 block in the future. This navigation path can be mapped to the navigation path of the last 1000 obstacles in front of you, etc.
"The title of the article is a word," said Leung. "A vault is a place where you can save money, but blockchain also allows you to" jump " barriers when connected to the network. When carrying a load, I just need a road barrier in the past to find a road barrier in the future. I can overcome all the intermediate barriers, which saves a lot of bandwidth for us.”
Split and cast
To reduce data storage requirements, researchers have created storage using a new "distribution" strategy. This technology divides the transaction data into smaller pieces, which it shares with the network, so each user has to process only a small amount of data to verify the transaction.
To implement secure distribution, the database uses a well-known data structure called the Merkel binary tree. In a binary tree, a branch node is divided into two "child" nodes, each node is divided into two child nodes, and so on.
In a Merkel tree, the upper node has a single hash, called a root hash. The tree grows to a height of. The tree combines each pair at the bottom, creating a parent hash. Repeat this process until the tree, assigning a parent node to each pair, until it accumulates everything in the root hash. In cryptocurrencies, the upper node has a hash on a block. Each lower node has a hash indicating information about the balance of an account participating in an exchange in the block. The equilibrium distribution and the barrier distribution are related to each other.
To verify all transactions, the network combines the two nodes to obtain the hash of the parent node. This re-enters the process of working with the tree. If the final combined hash corresponds to the root of the block, the transaction can be verified. But with traditional cryptocurrencies, users must store the entire structure of the tree.
With the help of the database, researchers divide the Merkel tree into separate fragments designed for each user group. Each user account stores only the balance of the account in a given part, as well as the root hashes. The cleverness is that all users maintain a single node layer that traverses the entire miracle tree. When a user needs to verify the transaction from outside his or her turn, he or she controls the path to that normal level. From this general level, they can determine the balance of accounts outside of the particle and continue to verify as usual.
"Each part of the network is responsible for storing a small part of the big data architecture, but this small part allows the user to verify negotiations with all other parts of the network," Leung said.
Furthermore, researchers have developed a new strategy that recognizes and ignores the calculation of a given fraction of users who have zero balance over a given period. Other cryptocurrencies hold all empty accounts, which increases data storage requirements, but have no real purpose, as they do not need verification. When storing account data in increased storage, users ignore these old and empty accounts.