In this week’s episode, we revisit the topic of consensus algorithms with Ren Zhang (https://twitter.com/nirenzang), a researchers at Nervos and previously at imec-COSIC (KU Leuven). We chat about an earlier work he did on evaluating PoW consensus protocols security and explore his more recent work on NC-Max - a consensus protocol that breaks the throughput limit and enables the full utilization of the nodes’ bandwidth in confirming transactions
Here are a few of the links we mention in the interview:
- Consensus Algorithms & HotStuff with Ittai Abraham (https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/127)
- Majority is not Enough:Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable (https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ie53/publications/btcProcFC.pdf)
- FruitChains: A Fair Blockchain (https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/916.pdf)
- RSK technology (https://www.rsk.co/)
- Subchains: A Technique to Scale Bitcoin and Improve the User Experience (https://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/resources/subchains.pdf)
- Lay Down the Common Metrics: Evaluating Proof-of-Work Consensus Protocols' Security (https://www.esat.kuleuven.be/cosic/publications/article-3005.pdf) by Ren Zhang & Bart Preneel
- NC-Max: Breaking the Throughput Limit of Nakamoto Consensus (https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1101.pdf) by Ren Zhang, Dingwei Zhang, Quake Wang, Jan Xie and Bart Preneel
- SquirRL (https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.01798) - A recent paper extending the "Lay Down the Common Metrics" paper
- Markov decision process (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_decision_process) on Wikipedia
- Monsters in the Mempool with Dan Robinson from Paradigm (https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/153)
- Prism: Deconstructing the Blockchain to Approach Physical Limits (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.08092.pdf)
- Alan Szepieniec on Hash Functions & Supersonic SNARKs (https://www.zeroknowledge.fm/105)
More on Nervos:
For the UTXO Programming Model of Nervos, the best starting point is Ren’s colleague Xuejie Xiao's blog (https://xuejie.space/2019_07_05_introduction_to_ckb_script_programming_validation_model/).
An explanation of Nervos DAO (https://xuejie.space/2019_07_05_introduction_to_ckb_script_programming_validation_model/)
An introduction of the Virtual Machine and smart contract support (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vezNBU5Isgg)
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