Interesting, but it also reminds me of the way the master nodes work in Dash. Differences?
As I understand it... Masternodes are basically mixer nodes, but VNL does not
employ this kind of anonymity. Also the paper cites as reference
the "transaction locking" feature that was added later to masternodes,
but the mechanism is different, as with VNL the locking happens
through synchonization of "global transaction pool".
However, the paper speaks about "storage nodes" and "slots" without
defining them. A node (an "ordinary" one, I presume) must get information
about a given transaction from a set of storage nodes before it can consider the
transaction safe to spend.
A nonprofessional in P2P technology like myself can certainly get an impression
that the storage nodes are some kind of masternodes with special functions and privileges.
But perhaps they are simply the same as full nodes in Bitcoin, ie nodes that relay and retain transactions.
The way I read it is that you are on the right track with "global transaction pool". The whole pool is a distributed p2p pool of ordinary nodes and at any one time some nodes act / emulate "super peers", "storage nodes" etc. They are not distinct or permanant entities and the roles move around between nodes as time progresses. The network as whole therefore acts as a distributed p2p application in real time and therefore is a truly distributed p2p decentralised system.
