Coinspermia: A Cryptocurrency Unchained

Abstract

The latency and throughput of blockchain-based cyrptocurrencies is a major concern for their suitability as mainstream currencies and as transaction processors in general. The prevalent proof-of-work scheme, exemplified by Bitcoin, is a deliberately laborious effort: the time and energy required to mine blocks makes the blockchain virtually immutable and assists in the consensus-reaching process. Coinspermia (coin=money + spermia=seed) is a different approach: transactions are concurrently seeded throughout a network of peer nodes to an extent sufficient to achieve a high reliability of essential currency operations, including the fast transfer of coins from an owner to a recipient, and the prevention of double spending. A number of Bitcoin features are retained in Coinspermia, including transaction input-outputs and cryptographic addresses and signing, but no special proof-of-work is required to commit transactions. Instead, a client can be assured of an operation completion when a quorum of network nodes acknowledge the operation, which can occur before a transaction operation finishes propagating through the network. Simulation substantiates improved latency and throughput.