Sovereign cryptocurrencies are a digital means for turning trust into liquidity. They are units of debt that can be issued and traded digitally by people, communities, corporations, municipalities, and central banks, and can serve as a foundation for a grassroots digital economy that emerges and functions without initial capital or external credit. As each sovereign provides for the economic and computational integrity of its own cryptocurrency, the distributed implementation of sovereign cryptocurrencies needs only realize dissemination and leader-based equivocation (double-spending) exclusion. Importantly, it does not require expensive all-to-all synchronization protocols such as blockchain consensus or Byzantine Atomic Broadcast, nor even Byzantine Reliable Broadcast. In this paper we introduce the principles that underlie sovereign cryptocurrencies, and focus on sovereign personal cryptocurrencies, issued and traded by people: We elaborate their possible economic uses, as derived from these principles; specify them formally via multiagent transition systems; prove the resulting protocol to be grassroots, meaning that disjoint instances of it can be deployed independently and later interoperate; specify a grassroots distributed implementation of the sovereign personal cryptocurrencies protocol; and prove it correct. The difference between sovereign cryptocurrencies for people and for organizations is that people can issue and trade sovereign coins on their own behalf, whereas signatures by multiple people are normally required to authorize a transaction on behalf of an organization. Elaborating the principles of sovereign cryptocurrencies for organizations and extending the specification and implementation to multisignature accounts is the subject of subsequent work.
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