Open Questions and Future Research Topics

1. How to achieve Sybil protection on the Peer Discovery phase? - Section 3.2 Peer Discovery.

2. Committee failure detection and recovery mechanism. Section 6.5 dRNG.

3. Backup random beacon based on VDFs. Section 6.5 dRNG.

4. How much mana does an attacker needs to overtake the committee? Section 6.5 dRNG.

5. How can we identify that a tip spam is happening, in order to increase the parental number in TSA? Section 4.3 TSA.

6. Alternative Mana criterion for neighbor selection (instead of pure cMana) Sections 4.3 Mana and 2.2 Neighbor Selection

7. When a node joins the network, initial synching, solidification, and Mana calculations may be computationally heavy tasks due to the sheer amount of messages in the tangle. Then, some additional mechanism may be needed to be implemented, such as for example delaying aMana and cMana calculation until the initial syncing is finished.

8. When a node receives a message cannot (immediately) know whether other messages with older timestamp (issued by the same node) have not been received yet. An attacker may exploit this and progressively issue messages with older timestamp to perform an easier PoW difficulty (Section 3.3 - Rate control).