Dr. Joachim Neu - Internet-Scale Consensus in the Blockchain Era

The talk will be given in English)

Speaker:     Dr. Joachim Neu

Stanford University

 hall, Electrical Engineering-Kitot Building‏ 011

Wednesday, January 10^th, 2024

15:00 - 16:00

Internet-Scale Consensus in the Blockchain Era

Abstract

Blockchains have ignited interest in Internet-scale consensus as a fundamental building block for decentralized applications and services, which promise egalitarian access and robustness to faults and abuse. While the study of consensus has a 40+ year tradition, the new Internet-scale setting requires a fundamental rethinking of models, desiderata, and protocols.

A key challenge is to simultaneously serve users with different security requirements. I will focus on two examples from my work: (1) Some users want uninterrupted service-availability even as protocol participants unexpectedly come and go, while other users demand that perpetrators can be held accountable in case of service-consistency breaches. We show that no traditional protocol can satisfy both simultaneously. To resolve this dilemma, we develop the ebb-and-flow consensus paradigm, which has been adopted in Ethereum (the largest freely-programmable blockchain). (2) Some users wish to harden consistency even at the expense of availability, while others prefer to stick to traditional consensus protocols' equal resilience to consistency and availability attacks. We present the first protocols that allow optimal availability-consistency tradeoff for every user simultaneously.

Short Bio

Joachim Neu is a PhD candidate at Stanford University advised by David Tse. His research focuses on the science and engineering of Internet-scale consensus as a fundamental building block for decentralized systems, using tools from distributed systems, probabilistic systems analysis, networking and communications, and applied cryptography. While a Masters student at Technical University of Munich, he worked in information and coding theory. Joachim has received the Protocol Labs PhD Fellowship and the Stanford Graduate Fellowship.

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