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Charles hoskinson married12/3/2023 First, you have to pick somebody to be in charge for a moment of time. Hoskinson: First off, whether you’re proof of stake or proof of work, you can have three things that you have to accomplish with a consensus algorithm. Many may not know that there are different variants of proof of stake. One of the signature features of Cardano was the Ouroboros consensus mechanism. Register for the Free Forbes Webinar “How to Profit from Bitcoin and Other Crypto Assets Without Owning Them” being held on April 29įorbes: This leads me to the proof of work/proof of stake question. We’re definitely a big contributor in this space, but there are a lot of great teams like Algorand, for example, and the Cornell team led by Emin Gun Sirer, the Snow White protocol, and so forth. Especially if you admit what are called Byzantine actors-people who could lie and cheat. So, it’s really easy to say: “We’ll just pick a common point of reference-a central server, like a Microsoft server in Washington, and whatever ordering it gives us, that’s great.” But when you are actually in a distributed system where no one is in control or special over anybody else, it turns out that’s a much, much, much harder problem. Who got the trade if there are two bids that come in at the same time? Did it go to Alice or Bob? Well, based on how you order things will determine it. Why is this important? Let’s say you’re running a financial system. The point of consensus algorithms and timekeeping is to create one logical clock or one logical, canonical ordering of events. So when you order these things, Jenny would put: Michael - 2. If something happens on Michael’s computer, you think that happened first, but Jenny would think that happened second. That was the first one that was called “Byzantine resistance.” But the basic idea is that the minute you leave the comfort of your laptop or your cell phone or your computer and you go into the web-a distributed system-then your perception of events and reality is different than other people’s perception of events and reality.įor example, let’s say you’re closer to Michael’s computer than Jenny’s. He also wrote Paxos, which is a distributed systems protocol. He wrote some of the foundational papers-for example, Lamport clocks, about how to keep time in a distributed system. Hoskinson: Distributed systems is one of the oldest areas of computer science-conceptually a very simple problem but, in practice, a very difficult one. Talk a little bit about how that work, with roots in computer science, informs the research you’re doing as it pertains to blockchains? That’s the hardest part.įorbes: Many people coming to crypto and blockchain may not realize that the ideas of decentralized consensus and networks didn’t originate with blockchains. It’s almost like an architect to a general contractor the architect draws these blueprints up, shows you how to make the house, but they obviously don’t build it-the general contractor does that. How do we take those capabilities and actually put them into a system? Now, we go to engineers, a very special type of engineer called “the formal methods engineer”-they read a scientific paper and actually create the blueprint. And then the third part of our research portfolio is protocol-specific.
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