KRNC: New Foundations for Permissionless Byzantine Consensus and Global Monetary Stability

TL;DR

This paper introduces KRNC, a biologically inspired permissionless Byzantine consensus protocol that significantly enhances security and speed, enabling cryptographic inflation protection for fiat money and addressing previous security vulnerabilities.

Contribution

It presents a novel asymmetric Sybil-resistance mechanism, Proof-of-Balance, replacing traditional schemes, and offers a new formal trust framework along with security analysis against known exploits.

Findings

KRNC achieves ~40,000 times the security and speed of existing ledgers.

Proof-of-Balance effectively replaces Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake.

Identifies and addresses vulnerabilities like book-prize and pseudo-transfer attacks.

Abstract

This paper applies biomimetic engineering to the problem of permissionless Byzantine consensus and achieves results that surpass the prior state of the art by four orders of magnitude. It introduces a biologically inspired asymmetric Sybil-resistance mechanism, Proof-of-Balance, which can replace symmetric Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake weighting schemes. The biomimetic mechanism is incorporated into a permissionless blockchain protocol, Key Retroactivity Network Consensus ("KRNC"), which delivers ~40,000 times the security and speed of today's decentralized ledgers. KRNC allows the fiat money that the public already owns to be upgraded with cryptographic inflation protection, eliminating the problems inherent in bootstrapping new currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. The paper includes two independently significant contributions to the literature. First, it replaces the non-structural axioms invoked in prior work with a new formal method for reasoning about trust, liveness, and safety from first principles. Second, it demonstrates how two previously overlooked exploits, book-prize attacks and pseudo-transfer attacks, collectively undermine the security guarantees of all prior permissionless ledgers.