In this week’s episode, we revisit the topic of consensus algorithms with Ren Zhang, a researchers at Nervos and previously at imec-COSIC (KU Leuven). We chat about an earlier work he did on evaluating PoW consensus protocols security and explore his more recent work on NC-Max - a consensus protocol that breaks the throughput limit and enables the full utilization of the nodes’ bandwidth in confirming transactions

Here are a few of the links we mention in the interview:

Consensus Algorithms & HotStuff with Ittai Abraham
Majority is not Enough:Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable
FruitChains: A Fair Blockchain
RSK technology
Subchains: A Technique to Scale Bitcoin and Improve the User Experience
Lay Down the Common Metrics: Evaluating Proof-of-Work Consensus Protocols' Security by Ren Zhang & Bart Preneel
NC-Max: Breaking the Throughput Limit of Nakamoto Consensus by Ren Zhang, Dingwei Zhang, Quake Wang, Jan Xie and Bart Preneel
SquirRL - A recent paper extending the "Lay Down the Common Metrics" paper
Markov decision process on Wikipedia
- Monsters in the Mempool with Dan Robinson from Paradigm
Prism: Deconstructing the Blockchain to Approach Physical Limits
Alan Szepieniec on Hash Functions & Supersonic SNARKs

More on Nervos:

For the UTXO Programming Model of Nervos, the best starting point is Ren’s colleague Xuejie Xiao's blog.

An explanation of Nervos DAO

An introduction of the Virtual Machine and smart contract support

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Given that privacy is at the core of their work and mission, least authority recognizes the importance of privacy in DeFi and other decentralizing technologies and the role it plays in preserving balance of power. Least Authority is supporting this through a growing list of security reviews, building distributed systems and regular contributions to open source software projects.

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