 a set of nodes, some of which may exhibit crash or Byzantine faults, aim to reach agreement on the state of some system or a log of events. Due to the recent interest in decentralized cryptocurrencies and their applications, distributed consensus has received heightened attention from both the cryptocurrency and academic communities. From the communities’ joint efforts at deploying consensus on an Internet scale, we have achieved a new leap in our understanding of consensus. We also understand the new challenges that have come with the large-scale and decentralized nature of the deployments — challenges that were not there classically when we considered reaching consensus among three nodes on a spaceship or among a dozen nodes within a single organization.
The second workshop of the semester, Large-Scale Consensus and Blockchains, took place from October 22 to 25, 2019, and was co-organized by Dahlia Malkhi (Calibra) and Elaine Shi (Cornell University).
The workshop brought together researchers interested in distributed consensus, including representatives of the distributed systems, cryptography, and economics communities. The workshop was structured as a mix of keynotes and research presentations. It began with a day featuring four distinguished keynote talks: Barbara Liskov on the genesis of BFT consensus and on current atomic cross-chain transactions, Christian Cachin on decentralized trust models and Stellar, Maurice Herlihy on guarantees of cross-chain transactions, and Tal Rabin on managing threshold cryptography in decentralized settings. The following two days were filled with research talks by students, faculty, and industry researchers. The last day was dedicated to cross-disciplinary works on blockchain/consensus and game theory.
Mechanisms that incentivize parties to cooperate
The crypto-economic disruption goes deeper than the libertarian Bitcoin vision of digital money without government. This necessitates deep study into various societal aspects of the disruption.
Many studies cross several domains, including computer science, market design, and game theory. For example, various works over the past few years provide game theory analysis of Nakamoto consensus safety. Other works include empirical studies of financial activity in the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks, e.g., transaction front-running and arbitrage. In the future, more work will be needed to understand the foundations of mechanisms that govern decentralization of Nakamoto consensus and/or new consensus algorithms.
Crypto-economic systems could have a potentially vast impact on the very fabric of economics and society. It is essential to understand the responsibilities that the technology bears concerning customer protection and the prevention of bad usage, such as terrorist activity. Much more cross-domain work will incorporate law, economics, and computer science considerations in order both to identify the gaps that this disruption has created and to innovate to help society understand and embrace it.
The final workshop of the semester, Blockchain in Society: Applications, Economics, Law, and Ethics, was co-organized by Abhi Shelat, Helen Nissenbaum, and Peter Van Valkenburgh and took place from November 18 to 22, 2019. The workshop was devoted to questions concerning technical, economic, legal, and ethical implications of recent advances in consensus, blockchain data structures, and zero-knowledge proofs.
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