[liberationtech] Friday, May 13 at Stanford -- Elaine Shi: Scalable and Incentive-Compatible Blockchain Design

[Yosem Companys]

From: David Wu <dwu4 at cs.stanford.edu>
>
>           Scalable and Incentive-Compatible Blockchain Design
>
>                             Elaine Shi
>
>                        Friday, May 13, 2016
>                           Talk at 4:15pm
>                             Gates 463
>
> Abstract:
>
> The distributed systems and cryptography literature has traditionally
focused
> on the "permissioned" model where protocol participants are known a
priori.
> Bitcoin's rapid rise to fame represents an exciting breakthrough: it
> popularized a "permissionless" model where anyone can join and leave
> dynamically, and there is no prior knowledge of other participants.
>
> Bitcoin's core protocol is commonly referred to as a "blockchain", which,
> roughly speaking, realizes a consensus abstraction ensuring consistency
and
> liveness. Today's blockchain protocols, however, suffer from two main
> drawbacks that have given rise to vigorous debates in the community: 1)
> existing protocols have terrible performance; 2) existing protocols are
not
> incentive compatible and selfish mining attacks are well-known.
>
> In this talk, we present two latest results that address these painpoints,
> Fruitchain and Hybrid Consensus. Fruitchain is a new, game theoretically
> secure blockchain design that incentivizes honest behavior. Hybrid
Consensus
> offers an efficiency bootstrapping theorem for permissionless consensus:
we
> show how to leverage a slow blockchain protocol to bootstrap classical
> Byzantine Fault Tolerance protocols, such that we can achieve consensus
in the
> permissionless setting while attaining the performance of their
permissioned
> counterparts.
>
> Joint work with Rafael Pass.
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