naveedi

Full disclosure: I work on the cryptocurrency in this article, Algorand.

There are a lot of questions and speculation here about this paper and Algorand. I would be happy to try an answer them to your satisfaction. Some context may be helpful first, though. This paper is an innovation about one aspect of our technology. Algorand has a very fast consensus mechanism and can add blocks as quickly as the network can deliver them. We become a victim of our success. The blockchain will grow very rapidly. A terabyte a month is possible. The storage issue associated with our performance can quickly become an issue. The Vault paper is focused on solving this and other storage scaling problems.

The Algorand pure proof-of-stake blockchain and associated cryptocurrency has many novel innovations aside from Vault. It possesses security and scalability properties beyond what any other blockchain technology allows while still being completely decentralized. Our website, algorand.com, and whitepaper are great places to start to learn more.

If you learn best from videos then I suggest you watch Turing award winner and cryptographic pioneer, Silvio Micali, talk about Algorand: https://youtu.be/NykZ-ZSKkxM. He is a captivating speaker and the founder of Algorand.

As others have already stated the web today can be quite hard to read. WebAssembly doesn't make that situtation worse. WebAssembly, however, is and will continue to be well defined and openly documented. I am confident tooling will come that will help humans understand this format.

It might be time for a WebDwarf debug format, though, to help us. Source maps aren't quite robust enough.