Lecture

Consensus Mechanisms: Bitcoin and Distributed Ledger Technology

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In course

CS-438: Decentralized systems engineering

A decentralized system is one that works when no single party is in charge or fully trusted. This course teaches decentralized systems principles while guiding students through the engineering of their own decentralized system featuring messaging, file sha ...

Description

This lecture covers permissionless consensus and multi-valued history consensus in Bitcoin and distributed ledger technology, explaining the concepts of information-based money, ledger, transactions, and public keys. The instructor, Bryan Ford, discusses the challenges and mechanisms of permissioned consensus, including Multi-Paxos, Raft, and PBFT. The lecture also delves into the concept of asynchronous pacing and consensus, introducing the Threshold Logical Clock (TLC) and 'Que Sera Consensus' (QSC) as alternative consensus mechanisms.

Instructors (2)

Pierluca Borsò

Expertise Teaching & PhD Courses Decentralized systems engineering CS-438 A decentralized system is one that works when no single party is in charge or fully trusted. This course teaches decentralized systems principles while guiding students through the engineering of their own decentralized system featuring messaging, file sharing, encryption, and blockchain concepts.

Bryan Alexander Ford

Links DEDIS lab home pagePersonal home page Curriculum vitae https://bford.info/cv.pdf Teaching & PhD PhD Students Shailesh Mishra Past EPFL PhD Students Eleftherios Kokoris Kogias, Kirill Nikitin, Cristina Basescu, Enis Ceyhun Alp, Simone Colombo, Pasindu Nivanthaka Tennage, Louis-Henri Manuel Jakob Merino Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector David Froelicher, Ludovic Barman, Georgia Fragkouli Courses Decentralized systems engineering CS-438 A decentralized system is one that works when n

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Computer engineering

Computer security: Blockchain

Related concepts (32)

Blockchain

A blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of records (blocks) that are securely linked together via cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data (generally represented as a Merkle tree, where data nodes are represented by leaves). Since each block contains information about the previous block, they effectively form a chain (compare linked list data structure), with each additional block linking to the ones before it.

Bitcoin

Bitcoin (abbreviation: BTC or XBT; sign: ₿) is a decentralized digital currency. Bitcoin transactions are verified by network nodes through cryptography and recorded in a public distributed ledger called a blockchain. The cryptocurrency was invented in 2008 by an unknown person or group of people using the name Satoshi Nakamoto. The currency began use in 2009, when its implementation was released as open-source software. The word "bitcoin" was defined in a white paper published on October 31, 2008.

Bitcoin network

The Bitcoin network is a peer-to-peer network of nodes which implement the Bitcoin protocol. The protocol itself implements a highly available, public, and decentralized ledger. The nodes verify that each update to the ledger follows the rules of the Bitcoin protocol. Users broadcast cryptographically signed messages to the network using Bitcoin cryptocurrency wallet software. These messages are proposed transactions, changes to be made in the ledger. Each node has a copy of the ledger's entire transaction history.

Proof of stake

Proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols are a class of consensus mechanisms for blockchains that work by selecting validators in proportion to their quantity of holdings in the associated cryptocurrency. This is done to avoid the computational cost of proof-of-work (POW) schemes. The first functioning use of PoS for cryptocurrency was Peercoin in 2012, although the scheme, on the surface, still resembled a POW. For a blockchain transaction to be recognized, it must be appended to the blockchain.

Byzantine fault

A Byzantine fault (also Byzantine generals problem, interactive consistency, source congruency, error avalanche, Byzantine agreement problem, and Byzantine failure) is a condition of a computer system, particularly distributed computing systems, where components may fail and there is imperfect information on whether a component has failed. The term takes its name from an allegory, the "Byzantine generals problem", developed to describe a situation in which, to avoid catastrophic failure of the system, the system's actors must agree on a concerted strategy, but some of these actors are unreliable.

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