Digital civilisation: manifesto for a trustworthy, well regulated world
A.W. Roscoe
Digital Civilisation Conference

Digital technology is advancing at a fantastic, some would say alarming, rate. It is taking over so much of how we interact with the world and each other. However it more reflects commercial opportunities and disconnected attempts to streamline government services than a proper digital civilisation. It offers the chance for a smoother and easier life while threatening a loss of personal privacy. We believe that society should develop ways of making all this technology more cohesive, more ethical and more respectful of the individual. We think that society should come together and organise the rules by which it expects technology to play, and the technological tools to allow a cohesive digital civilisation to grow. These two things are the core of our digital civilisation initiative.
The greening of blockchain mining
A.W. Roscoe, Bangdao Chen
University College Oxford Blockchain Research Centre
The Blockhouse Technology Limited

We analyse the proof of work mining model and show how to simulate many of its properties in a form of proof of stake called Work your Stake. In doing so we create innovations on timing, branch prevention and achieving an unbiasable random oracle that will be useful in other Blockchain models and decentralised systems. At the time of writing (mid 2019) the best known public blockchains are maintained by proof of work, a protocol which is simultaneously magical and disastrous. We will see why it is magical later. The best-known objection to it is that proof of work wastes energy. Mining a block of the bitcoin blockchain currently means that the network has to compute a truly astronomical number of hashes: about 2.2*1022.