Distributed Trust: Is “Blockchain” the answer?
Talkat 15th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI '21) · 2021-07-14..07-16·
summary
Argues that blockchain often isn’t the right tool and backs it with specifics: bitcoin’s proof-of-work targets a new block every ~10 minutes and now consumes 7.7 gigawatts; wallets wait six-block wait (~1 hour) to feel safe; forks happen from partitions or differing clients; public ledgers bloat to about a quarter-terabyte ledger per full node. Offers concrete alternatives — notaries for timestamps, resilient routing where sources pick paths and per-flow buffers, multi-cloud backups — and shows where blockchain helps (rarely) and where it wastes energy or trust.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00The hype around blockchain
- 2:01What is blockchain
- 3:30How the ledger works
- 5:29Security and consensus
- 8:37Centralized vs distributed
- 13:04Human factors in security
- 16:47Robust distributed design
- 26:16Data storage challenges
- 30:45Blockchain forks and risks
- 37:59Evaluating use cases
- 42:04Q&A and conclusion
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