Scaling Bitcoin Milan: A Recap of the Conference’s Scalability Discussions
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On 26 February the 3rd workshop on Bitcoin and Blockchain Research in association with Financial Cryptography took place in Barbados. This workshop aims to bring together researchers interested in cryptocurrencies to present their latest work and discuss together the future of Bitcoin. The themes addressed during the workshop included blockchain architecture, anonymity, and proof of work alternatives.
This event was also a great way for researchers with similar interests to network and share their ideas. The workshop consisted of 2 keynotes and 4 plenary sessions: Nathaniel Popper kicked off the day with a keynote presentation. He went on to speak about the history of Bitcoin covering Silk Road, Bitcoin scalability workshop plans Gox, as well as the bitcoin scalability workshop plans of governments.
Then the first session, about Bitcoin scalability workshop plans network analysis, included two talks. The first one, Stressing Out: Bitcoin Stress Testingby Khaled Baqer et al. The second one was Why buy when you can rent? Bribery attacks on Bitcoin-style consensusby Joseph Bonneau on bribery attacks and cloud mining. Today many light-weight clients use SPV verification instead of full verification. Is it possible to have an even lighter verification?
Bitcoin scalability workshop plans introduce a modification of the Bitcoin blockchain protocol with sublinear complexity in the length of the chain. For the third session we heard two talks about Ethereum. Lessons and Insights from a Cryptocurrency Lab was a step by step guide to creating a smart contract. Smart contracts are not easy to program; the team exposed the difficulty they encountered when designing such applications. They even released open-source course materials for programming smart contracts.
Gustav Bitcoin scalability workshop plans from Ethereum then gave a keynote presentation: Ethereum Protocol and Client Implementations Security. The last session of the day, dedicated to Blockchain Architecture, included a presentation by Andrew Miller on the controversial topic of Scaling Decentralized Blockchains.
He gave two applications of covenants that improve Bitcoin security: Then Iddo Bentov presented his paper on Cryptocurrencies Without Proof of Work where he proposed a proof of stake implementation. To conclude the day, Sean Bowe from Zcash did a live demo of the world first zero-knowledge contingency payment.
In his setting Alice wants to pay Bob to solve a Sudoku puzzle. This process relies on an interactive zero-knowledge proof and an atomic swap over the blockchain. It achieves privacy in both the solution and the problem while keeping a small transaction size. The transaction bitcoin scalability workshop plans also completely trustless.
Gregory Maxwell gave more technical details in his blogpost. Your email address will not be published. Bitcoin scalability workshop plans Iddo Bentov presented his paper on Cryptocurrencies Without Proof of Work where he proposed a proof of stake implementation To conclude the day, Sean Bowe from Zcash did a live demo of the world first zero-knowledge contingency payment.
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