A sledgehammer to crack a nut: why blockchain is not (always) a good idea
summary
Argues that cryptocurrency does not need consensus and that permissionless mutual distrust is often overkill, replacing heavy consensus with secure broadcast and a lattice-based latest agreement abstraction that orders per-account histories only. Shows asynchronous asset transfer and reconfiguration algorithms that assume majority or >2/3 stake, are adaptive to conflict level, and yield orders of magnitude higher throughput than BFT consensus prototypes while avoiding proof-of-work energy waste. Prototypes exist and work under the stated quorum and adversary limits.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Start
- 5:18Blockchain = distributed ledger
- 10:30Why consensus is interesting?
- 13:11Consensus-less cryptocurrency
- 22:00Total order vs. partial order
- 29:35Using LA: asset transfer
- 33:31Configuration lattice: example
- 34:14Reconfigurable object
- 36:31Plug-and-play reconfiguration
- 37:22Permissionless asset transfer?
- 42:20Strong consistency of data in a large scale: a hard problem in a hard model?
- 45:25TrustShare: Innovation Chair
- 47:17The origin of innovation
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