(1) How do you ensure "chronological order in the block chain".
(2) What are these "strict cryptographic rules"
(3) What is the mechanism of this "lottery".
I agree that these are fundamental questions, and are the only reason why I wanted to look into the code, or have some specifications. This coin advertises itself as the first 100% proof-of-stake system, without revealing anything about how they solved the problems that prevented others to create one.
Looking into the code I couldn't find anything addressing the usual concerns about 100% PoS. (or is this one of the "injected" bugs? the part of the code securing PoS is simply missing?)
Answer to (1) is pretty much the same as Bitcoin: it just builds a chain of blocks, stores everything, cross-checks new blocks with old ones. It adds some spin to how accounts and public keys are stored, but there is no real innovation here.
(2) and (3) are more interesting. The algorithms seems to be the straightforward PoS: From the previous block it creates a hash. Each second it creates a (hash('time elapsed since last block' , 'own account key') * 'amount of coins on account') which it calls "target", and that determines whether the account has the right to create a new block or not. Additionally 'amount of coins' is zeroed out if the account has created a block within the last 1440 blocks.
I spent only around 30 mins reading the code, so at this point there are three options:
- There are somewhere else some additional rules to make the scheme actually secure that I haven't found.
- This is one of the purposefully injected bugs.
- The PoS is insecure and doesn't even attempt to address the issues that prompted the creators of other coins (such as peercoin) to also incorporate PoW to fix the shortcoming of PoS.
