Lisk is a crypto-currency and decentralized application platform. As a crypto-currency, much like Bitcoin and other alternatives, it provides a decentralized payment system and digital money network. The network itself, operates using a highly efficient Delegated-Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus model, that is secured by 101 democratically elected delegates. The Lisk decentralized application platform, it's most powerful component, allows the deployment, distribution and monetisation of decentralized applications and custom blockchains (sidechains) onto the Lisk blockchain.
Lisk partnered with Microsoft to integrate Lisk into its Azure Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) program — meaning developers worldwide can develop, test, and deploy Lisk blockchain applications using Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform and infrastructure.
The technology behind it:
During the ICO 100,000,000 LISK weree goven out to ICO participants, the core team, third parties and active community members. Once the network is established with 101 delegates there will be an inflation of 5 newly created LISK with every block, these are the Forging Rewards. Every 3,000,000 blocks (~1 year) this reward is reduced by 1 LISK, ending at 1 LISK per block where it stays like that forever.
The Forging Rewards will be equally distributed through all active (101 and higher) delegates, same as the network fees. We implemented this mechanism to create an incentive to run a delegate and secure the network. Additionally, this allows Lisk to finance itself in the future.
Lisk is written in JavaScript utilizing NodeJS.
Problems of Ethereum:
In traditional applied cryptography, security assumptions tend to look something like this:
No one can do more than 279 computational steps
Factoring is hard (ie. superpolynomial)
Taking nth roots modulo composites is hard
The elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem cannot be solved faster than in 2n/2 time
In cryptoeconomics, on the other hand, the basic security assumptions that we depend on are, alongside the cryptographic assumptions, roughly the following:
No set of individuals that control more than 25% of all computational resources is capable of colluding
No set of individuals that control more than 25% of all money is capable of colluding
The amount of computation of a certain proof of work function that can be accomplished with a given amount of money is not superlinear beyond a point which is reasonably low
There exist a non-negligible number of altruists and a non-negligible number of crazies or political opponents of the system, and the majority of users can be reasonably modeled as being close to economically rational
The number of users of a system is large, and users can appear or disappear at any time, although at least some users are persistent
Censorship is impossible, and any two nodes can send messages to each other relatively quickly.
It is trivial to generate a very large number of IP addresses, and one can purchase an unlimited amount of network bandwidth
Many users are anonymous, so negative reputations and debts are close to unenforceable
There will also be additional security assumptions specific to certain problems. Thus, quite often it will not even be possible to definitively say that a certain protocol is secure or insecure or that a certain problem has been solved. Rather, it will be necessary to create solutions that are optimized for particular empirical and social realities, and continue further and further optimizing them over time.