Counos Coin (CSC)

What is Counos Coin

A pure peer-to-peer version of an electronic payment method would allow online payments to be sent from one party directly to another without going through a financial institution. Digital signatures are part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party continues to be required to prevent doublespending.

We suggest a solution to the double-spending problem by using a peer-to-peer network. The network timestamps transactions by hashing them into a continuous chain of hash-based proof of work, creating a record that cannot be changed without recreating the proof-of-work. The longest chain not only serves as proof of the sequence of witnessed events, but also as proof that it comes from the largest pool of CPU power. As long as the majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that do not cooperate to attack the network, they will generate the longest chain and be faster than the attackers. The network itself requires only a minimal structure. Messages are transmitted on a best-effort basis and the nodes can arbitrarily leave and re-enter the network, accepting the longest proof-of-work chain as proof of what happened while they were away.

We define an electronic coin (coin) as a chain of digital signatures. Each owner transfers the coin to the next one by digitally signing a hash of the previous transaction and the next owner's public key and appending it to the end of the coin. The recipient of the payment can verify the signatures to verify the chain of owners

The problem, of course, is that the payee cannot verify that one of the owners has not duplicated the coin. One common solution is to introduce a central, trustworthy instance, or mint, that checks each transaction for double-spending. After each transaction, the Coin must be returned to the Mint for a new Coin to issue, and only Coins issued directly from the Mint can be trusted to have not been duplicated. The problem with this solution is that the fate of the entire monetary system depends on the company running the mint and that every transaction has to go through it like a bank.

We need a way to provide assurance to the payee that the previous owners did not sign previous transactions. For our purposes, the first transaction is the one that counts, so we do not have to worry about later multiple-issue attempts. The only way to confirm the absence of a transaction is to know all transactions. In the mint-based model, the Mint knew all the transactions and could decide which ones arrived first. In order to do this without a trusted party, transactions must be made public, and we need a system whereby subscribers agree on a single history of the order in which they arrived. The payee requires proof that at the time of each transaction, the majority of the nodes of the network agree that they have received them first.