Hi everyone,

Thanks to everyone for a very friendly and scientifically-oriented discussion. We have collated all the issues that have been raised related to NG, and placed them in context, here:

http://hackingdistributed.com/2015/11/09/bitcoin-ng-followup/

Overall, NG has a unique insight: turning the block creation process upside down can provide many benefits. Most notably, throughput can go as high as the network will allow, providing scalability benefits that increase as the network improves. There are many other side benefits, including fast confirmations that are stronger than 0-conf in Core, and come much more quickly than Core's 1-confirmations. And there are ancillary benefits as well, such as resilience to fluctuations in mining power, and healthier incentives for participants to ferry transactions. We believe that a fresh new permission-less blockchain protocol, designed today, would end up looking more like NG than Core. Of course, if NG could possibly be layered on top of Bitcoin, that would be the ultimate combination.

Many thanks for an interesting discussion, and as always, we're happy to hear constructive suggestions and feedback,

- egs

On Wed, Oct 14, 2015 at 2:02 PM, Emin Gün Sirer <el33th4x0r@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi everyone,

We just released the whitepaper describing Bitcoin-NG, a new technique for addressing some of the scalability challenges faced by Bitcoin. Surprisingly, Bitcoin-NG can simultaneously increase throughput while reducing latency, and do so without impacting Bitcoin's open architecture or changing its trust model. This post illustrates the core technique:
http://hackingdistributed.com/2015/10/14/bitcoin-ng/
while the whitepaper has all the nitty gritty details:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.02037

Fitting NG on top of the current Bitcoin blockchain is future work that we think is quite possible. NG is compatible with both Bitcoin as is, as well as Blockstream-like sidechains, and we currently are not planning to compete commercially with either technology -- we see NG as being complementary to both efforts. This is pure science, published and shared with the community to advance the state of blockchains and to help them reach throughputs and latencies required of cutting edge fintech applications. Perhaps it can be adopted, or perhaps it can provide the spark of inspiration for someone else to come up with even better solutions.

We would be delighted to hear your feedback.
- Ittay Eyal and E. Gün Sirer.