Scalability of Encointer - a Proof-Of-Personhood Cryptocurrency

Abstract

Encointer is a cryptocurrency using a novel consensus mechanism called Proof- Of-Personhood which is based on people meeting physically at regular intervals in order to attest each other's personhood. After having a digital identity which is provably linked to a real human being, each user receives a universal basic income in one of Encointer's local community currencies. The protocol requires complex logic to be calculated on the blockchain like verifying geolocations or assigning users to meetups in order to guarantee the security of the system. To ensure Encointer's scalability to a large number of users it is crucial that those computations are as e cient as possible which is not yet the case. In this thesis we present solutions to three major scalability problems of Encointer, evaluate them in terms of runtime and security and provide implementations that are ready to be merged into Encointer's production system.