Essay on Improving Authenticated Dynamic Dictionaries , with Applications to Cryptocurrencies

In cryptocurrencies a public ledger needs to be easily verifiable. However, maintaining a data structure of all the account balances can become quite problematic. As a first solution, keeping the data structure in secondary memory is slow due to its access times. From a different point of view, maintaining it in RAM upsets the whole idea of decentralized cryptocurrencies due to requiring powerful machines. The article by Leonid Reyzin, Dmitry Meshkov, Alexander Chepurnoy and Sasha Ivanov proposes an improved design and implementation of two-party and three-party authenticated dynamic dictionaries which are applied to cryptocurrency ledgers. The performance of the proposed schemes are evaluated under realistic transaction loads. The aim of this essay is to highlight the key points of their article.