Cryptographic mechanisms in distributed ledgers

本项目考虑分布式账本系统中使用的各种共识协议，以评估其有效性，以及在其他应用程序中使用的潜力。一个这样的应用是在可验证的延迟函数中，其中求解器将产生一个抵抗并行化的顺序计算，以产生一个可以有效地验证为合法的时间延迟。它的应用包括去中心化的公共随机性、时间戳，以及为构建资源高效的区块链提供工具。由于担心比特币的可持续性，后一种属性特别受关注，众所周知，比特币使用大量能源。该项目的一项特别研究任务是将vdf扩展到多方设置，因为这将允许每一方嵌入输入。这可能会提供进一步的应用，如去中心化拍卖，以及与电子投票方案一起使用以提供投票证明的潜力。

This project considers various consensus protocol used in distributed ledger systems to assess their validity, and potential for use in other applications. One such application is in verifiable delay functions, where a solver will produce a sequential calculation resistant to parallelisation, to produce a time delay which can be efficiently verified as legitimate. This has applications such as decentralised public randomness, timestamping, and providing a tool for building resource-efficient blockchains. This latter property is particularly topical due to concerns about the sustainability of Bitcoin, which is known to use huge quantities of energy.A particular research task in the project is the extension of VDFs to the multi-party setting, as this will allow inputs to be embedded by each party. This may provide further applications such as decentralised auctions, and the potential for use with an e-voting scheme to provide a proof of vote.