Proof of Authority: a next-generation foundational distributed ledger platform for institutional communication, authorisation and consensus

合作带来好处，但信任界限阻碍了个人和组织之间的自由往来，因为利益不一致的风险很高。为了获得社会或经济利益，参与者必须跨越这些信任界限。目前，这需要可信的中介机构：汇丰（HSBC）、eBay、AirBnB或英国政府。中介只有通过网络效应才可行。因此，信任成为一种稀缺资源——获取成本高昂，但容易被滥用。成本归结为核查、报告、审计和对外关系；主要都是手工任务。数字化深刻地改变了商业，从银行等传统行业到物联网等新兴行业；然而，信任仍然是一项手工的、人力密集型的活动，其成本高得令人难以置信。业内专家估计，由于缺乏合适的交易平台，仅银行就将高达80%的运营成本花费在与信任相关的任务上，例如交易后验证。新的去中心化区块链技术有可能成为一个新概念的核心：一种将信任商品化的通用机器。根据这项授权，我们将基于我们的授权证明（PoA）区块链技术开发可部署的信任机器平台PoC，该平台可以由灵活的多个自主选择的独立方操作，这些方有权“无需信任”地进行协作。作为以太坊项目（2014年第二成功的众筹活动）的一部分，以太坊团队一直处于技术发展的最前沿，最近在英国政府关于区块链技术的报告以及《经济学人》的专题报道中都特别提到了这一点。这笔拨款将支持我们poa分布式账本系统的开发，这是金融机构、政府和企业下一代安全多方交易系统的基础构建块。

Benefits come from working together, but trust boundaries prevent individuals andorganisations from dealing freely with each other, because of the high risk that interests arenot aligned. In order to engage for social or economic gain, actors must cross these trustboundaries. Presently this requires trusted intermediaries: HSBC, eBay, AirBnB, or thegovernment of the UK. Intermediation is viable only through network effects. As such, trustbecomes a scarce resource– expensive to obtain and yet easy to abuse.Costs come down to verification, reporting, auditing, and external relations; all primarilymanual tasks. Digitisation has changed business profoundly, from traditional industries suchas banking to new sectors like IoT; however, trust is still a manual, human-intensive activitywhich comes at incredibly high costs. Industry experts estimate that banks alone spend up to80% of their operational cost on trust-related tasks, e.g. post-transaction verification due to thelack of suitable transaction platforms.New decentralised blockchain technology has the potential to become the core of a newconcept: a universal machine that commoditises trust. Under this grant, we will develop adeployable PoC of a trust-machine platform, based on our Proof-of-Authority (PoA)blockchain technology, which can be operated by a flexible plurality of self-chosenindependent parties who are empowered to collaborate “trustlessly”.The Ethcore team have been at the forefront of technological development as part of theEthereum project (in 2014 the second most successful crowdfunded campaign), which wasnotably mentioned most recently in the UK government report on blockchain technology aswell as featured by the Economist. This grant will support the development of our PoAdistributed ledger system – a foundational building block for next-generation secure multipartytransactional systems for financial institutions, government and enterprise.