Byzantine Fault Tolerance with Dynamic Participation with Ling Ren | a16z crypto research talks
Source: YouTube · a16z crypto · published Dec 16, 2022 · 43:50
The video discusses blockchain consensus protocols, contrasting Bitcoin's dynamic participation with high latency against classic BFT's low latency with static participation, and introduces a novel solution using time-shifted quorums to achieve both properties simultaneously 0:09-0:42.
Key Takeaways:
• Consensus requires participants to agree on an ordered list of values despite malicious actors attempting to create disagreement or double-spend attacks 0:17-0:42.
• Bitcoin's protocol supports dynamic participation but suffers from long confirmation latency as security increases slowly over time 6:10-9:36.
• Classic BFT protocols offer low latency but rely on static quorums, losing liveness if participants go offline 15:49-16:08.
• The proposed solution uses "time-shifted quorums" to achieve both dynamic participation and low latency, though with high communication costs 31:19-32:23.
The talk concludes by identifying open research questions, such as formalizing intermediate synchrony models and improving efficiency of these consensus protocols.
Sources:
- 0:09-0:42 Definition of the consensus problem and state machine replication
- 6:10-9:36 Bitcoin's dynamic participation and latency issues
- 15:49-16:08 Classic BFT protocols with static quorums
- 31:19-32:23 Time-shifted quorums solution
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First 800 characters of the transcript
um I'm sure everybody knows about the consensus problem we say a blockchain problem is that the goal here is to build a ledger it's also called State machine replication all these different names in the literature right but the high level idea is that we want a set of participants to agree on the totally ordered list of values like despite that a fraction of the participants are malicious and they try to create disagreement among among honest participants right and uh in this talk I'm going to focus on what we call layer one right meaning that we will focus on how to agree on these values we're not going to care about what these values represent and what the what they mean and that's like they have different meanings in different applications like for example currency or storage smart cont…