New Foundations for Byzantine Consensus and Global Monetary Stability

Lead author here. This paper does a few things that HN may consider interesting.

1. It formalizes new security vulnerabilities in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Notably, it shows that all of these protocols repeat a simple statistical error that was introduced to the literature in the early 2000s.

2. It demonstrates how "honest majority" axioms can be replaced with a more rigorous formal method, which incorporates techniques from game theory and microeconomics to prove security from first principles.

3. It applies biological models to trust-minimized networking. By replacing handicap-authenticated signaling with cue-authenticated signaling, it obtains an exponential improvement in security and performance.

4. It proposes a cryptographic twist on the gold standard, which can deliver all the advantages of cryptocurrencies (inflation protection, smart contracts) without forcing society to abandon the existing monetary system.