What is Mithril @IOHK_Charles always mentions?
Short answer: It's Pyrros Chaidos and Aggelos Kiayias' proposal for a Stake-based Threshold Multisignature.
Long answer: Read more to learn wtf these words are
#cardano $ada #crypto #IOGresearch
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First of all, what is a threshold multisignature?
It's a form of cryptographic signature, just like in wallets when signing a #cardano transaction, except it needs a threshold of say, 2/3 of owners to sign. A threshold multisignature for 3 owners can require 2 signers
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This isn't limited to signing transactions, anything digital can be signed if that is useful in some way. For example, blocks in #cardano are actually signed by the stake pools minting them.
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Now comes the main innovation of Mithril: Stake-based.
Maybe you don't want the threshold to just count the number of signers, but the proportion of stake that signed. Could be useful for the largest Proof-of-Stake system ever created who knows.
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How do we do this?
The obvious way for getting a 50% stake threshold signature is asking every $ada holder to sign until you reach 50% of all $ada. Not great.
Mithril does this much more efficiently thanks to a lot of cryptographic magic
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To a sign a message, m possible signers are randomly selected based on their stake. If k out of m sign, a full signature is obtained.
This becomes very much like the previous example of 2 signers out of 3, except it's k out of m and they represent the stake of the network
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The parameters for this are very important, as you wouldn't want just 3 holders "representing" the entire network.
The more m signers you pick the better the signature represents the full network, but the process becomes slower. Tradeoffs as always...
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A major help in this tradeoff is the logarithmic complexity of Mithril. Depending on your math education this may be gibberish, for our purposes it means how slow Mithril will be with more signers.
The graph shows our logarithmic complexity along with others
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Now what is this for? Blockchain checkpoints could be approved by a Mithril signature. Your Daedelus node would just need to fetch the latest checkpoint instead of, you know, freezing you laptop for the next 10 hours.
Other uses could be approving Voltaire-era upgrades
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That was a very basic introduction to a very deep rabbit hole of cryptography, hope you learned something! Full paper iohk.io/en/research/li…
Yes I am ripping off @flantoshi's meme format, but doubt he's writing about cryptography 😉
also stake with SEA @SeasideStaking
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