Atomic Ownership Blockchains: Cryptographic-Level Security, Greater Decentralization, and Unbounded Throughput

Architecture
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We’d like to introduce Atomic Ownership Blockchains (AOB), a blockchain architecture that rethinks the trust model from first principles. We’re sharing this to invite technical scrutiny, discussion, and potential collaboration.

Core Properties

  1. Greater decentralization than Bitcoin
    In Bitcoin, transactions are not fully autonomous, they require permission from miners to be processed.AOB removes this dependency entirely. Payments are processed without requiring miner cooperation or awareness, achieving a stronger form of decentralization where no privileged party has structural access to transaction content.
  2. Cryptographic security against double-spend — no economic assumptions required
    Bitcoin’s double-spend resistance relies on the economic rationality of miners (i.e., that attacking the network is less profitable than honest mining). This is an wishful economic guarantee, not a cryptographic one. AOB’s double-spend protection is enforced at the cryptographic level, holding unconditionally regardless of miner incentives or hash rate distribution.
  3. Unbounded performance capacity
    AOB’s architecture does not impose a global throughput ceiling. Capacity scales without sacrificing the security or decentralization properties above.
  4. Hash-rate-anchored stablecoin under high decentralization
    AOB enables a stablecoin whose value is anchored to computational work (hash rate), issued and maintained under fully decentralized conditions without relying on collateral, governance tokens, or trusted oracles.

Why Now

We believe AOB addresses fundamental limitations that have constrained blockchain adoption — not at the application layer, but at the protocol layer. We are actively seeking research collaborators and commercial partners to develop and deploy this architecture.
More details and resources below. We welcome questions and critical feedback.

Published paper: Achieving Greater Decentralization with Atomic Ownership Blockchains
Unpublished preprint: Migrating Bitcoin to AOB for Enhanced Security
Grokipedia entry
Wikipedia draft

Two interactive demos:

Testnet (supports banknote-style payment and speedy-channel payment across devices on real netwrok) video

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Why public blockchains are not decentralized enough?

Bitcoin’s proof-of-work consensus can be compared to a wager, where miners bet computational resources for a chance to win rewards. It is a competition of power rather than a pursuit of truth. The “right” blockchain branch may lose out to one with greater computing power behind it.

In contrast, traditional voting reflects participants’ beliefs and conscience. Voters assess options and decide what they perceive as right. However, proof-of-work involves miners competing to solve a random cryptographic problem first. The winner who validates the next block gets the Bitcoin reward. This process favors greater computing power rather than the righteousness of the blockchain branch.

Therefore, a “just” or “truthful” branch does not necessarily succeed over one with more mining power. This highlights a potential issue with proof-of-work - it can allow less “just” outcomes to win if they have more resources behind them.

When Bitcoin was originally designed, it was envisioned that individuals would use their own computers to mine blocks. At the time, computers had similar hashing power and most people only owned one computer. In this scenario, comparing hashing power would be similar to comparing people, giving “voting by computational power” some legitimacy.

However, specialized Bitcoin mining machines were later developed specifically for mining Bitcoin. These machines proved to be more powerful than generic CPUs and GPUs, and as a result, they started to dominate the network’s hashing power. This meant that regular computer users could no longer effectively mine blocks, while a small group of professional miners with specialized machines reaped the rewards. This concentration of hashing power in large mining pools goes against the original idea of a decentralized Bitcoin network.

Some miners delegate their hashing power to pools, entrusting the pool operators to choose which blockchain fork to support in exchange for a share of rewards. This means that in practice, fork resolution is determined by the choices of these few large mining pool operators, rather than a truly decentralized and emergent process. The economic incentives of the mining pools often diverge from the interests of the broader Bitcoin community.

The legitimacy of “voting by computational power” depends on hashing power being distributed widely among independent actors. As mining becomes more centralized, the legitimacy of this mechanism as a fair and decentralized way of resolving forks diminishes accordingly.

Another problem with PoW is randomness. Driven by the principle of the longest chain, voters can only go with the wind. If one branch grows faster due to random factors and becomes the longest, miners originally on other branches will migrate to consolidate this randomly generated outcome. The principle of Proof of Work determines its tremendous randomness. Therefore, the essence of voting in Bitcoin is unprincipled, directionless, and futile. It does not reflect the views and conscience of nodes or objective reality, only helping achieve a formal unity.

On the Bitcoin blockchain, miners wield public power over users’ private rights. Every person has the private right to freely transact and dispose of their property as they see fit. But on Bitcoin, users require miners to record their transactions in order to exercise that private right. If miners were to refuse, for any reason, to record a user’s transactions, they would effectively deprive that user of their private right to control their funds. This demonstrates that miners, as public powers, have the capacity to influence and restrict private rights within the Bitcoin ecosystem. Users are thus compelled to place their trust in miners and are exposed to potential interference from these public powers.

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Monero suffered a 51% attack in August 2025.

There is the well known issue of Double Spending Attack. Supporters argue that an attacker with significant hashing power has a vested interest in the overall value of the Bitcoin network. They claim that such an attacker would hesitate to carry out a double spend attack because it would damage trust in Bitcoin and diminish the value of their hashing power investment.

Attackers are not always rational actors motivated solely by economic incentives. There are a few other possible motivations for a double spend attack: Ideological or political motives, Vandalism or hacktivism, Revenge or retaliation, Terrorism or destabilization, Mental illness.

Therefore, the foundation of system security must be a robust defense mechanism, rather than relying on the assumption that attackers have the ability to launch attacks but choose not to do so.

The value of blockchain technology lies in elevating the foundation of security from an economic level to a cryptographic level. By relying on cryptographic security, blockchain provides a more fundamental assurance that is less susceptible to unpredictable human factors.

Bitcoin has not yet achieved security at the cryptographic level. Although economic incentives offer some degree of deterrence, real-world attackers may not always act rationally. To address this, we require new blockchain technologies that do not rely solely on human rationality and can provide cryptographic level security. Only by attaining this level of security can blockchain truly achieve decentralization, as cryptography strengthens the security foundation beyond economic assumptions.

In a more serious scenario, let’s consider a hypothetical situation in Bitcoin’s history where there exists an unknown fork with a longer length than the widely accepted branch. This unrecognized branch is supported by a vast amount of computing power but is not made public. The person or entity who is aware of the existence of this hidden branch would have the power to initiate an attack and reverse all transactions that have taken place over a significant period of time.