Decentralized Computing: State of Affairs and a Vision
Abstract:
Bitcoin has the potential to revolutionize the current world's monetary systems and some other decentralized systems have the potential to help it revolutionize the internet — for the good of humankind and planet Earth. In this talk we justify this standpoint, overview state of affairs in decentralized computing and lay out a vision for its future.
Concretely, we discuss why the high energy consumption of Bitcoin’s PoW consensus is not wasteful and why Bitcoin should be embraced as the money of the future. We then overview state of affairs in scaling decentralized computing systems and argue that future decentralized systems should aim at leveraging the security of the “slow-but-very-secure” PoW consensus of Bitcoin. As a design principle, we propose building critical decentralized systems on top of Bitcoin PoW consensus, rather than trying to replace it with considerably less decentralized, alternative Layer 1 consensus protocols, such as Proof of Stake (PoS).
We extend this design approach further and propose Interplanetary Consensus (IPC) a generic approach to hierarchical blockchain consensus scaling that we are developing in ConsensusLab and gradually deploying in 2023 to the Filecoin network. Finally, we overview some of the open related research problems.
Short Bio:
Marko Vukolic leads external page ConsensusLab at external page Protocol Labs, where he works on many topics including scaling decentralized consensus. Prior to this, he was a Principal Research Staff Member in IBM Research Zurich, tenured faculty at EURECOM (2010-2014), and a visiting professor at Systems Group @ ETH Zurich (2014). He is one of the co-inventors of Hyperledger Fabric permissioned blockchain system, for which he received numerous technical awards.
He obtained a Doctor of Science (PhD) degree in Distributed Systems from EPFL in the Distributed Programming Laboratory (LPD) in 2008, with PhD thesis on external page Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus, state-machine replication and data storage. Before PhD, he graduated from EPFL Doctoral School in Computer and Communication Sciences in 2003 and obtained a dipl.ing. degree in Electrical Engineering (Telecommunications) from School of Electrical Engineering, University of Belgrade, in 2001.