IOHK | Consensus protocols - general overview
Channel: Input Output
Date: 25/09/2017

Charles Hoskinson is a Colorado based technology entrepreneur and mathematician. He attended Metropolitan State University of Denver and University of Colorado at Boulder to study Analytic Number Theory prior to moving into cryptography via industry exposure.

His professional experience includes founding three Cryptocurrency related start-ups - Invictus Innovations, Ethereum and IOHK - and a variety of colorful positions in the public and private sector. He was the founding chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation’s education committee and established the Cryptocurrency Research Group in September of 2013.

His current projects focus on education of cryptocurrency topics, evangelism of decentralization and making cryptographic tools easier to use for the mainstream.

https://iohk.io/team/charles-hoskinson/

Developing a secure proof of stake algorithm is one of the big challenges in cryptocurrency, and a proposed solution to this problem won the attention of the academic community.

Several hundred cryptographers from around the world arrived at the University of California Santa Barbara on Sunday for the flagship annual event of their field, Crypto 2017. Over several days, they present cutting edge research for the scrutiny of their peers, while in the evenings they continue discussions with friends and colleagues over dinner on the university campus, with the inspiring backdrop of the Santa Ynez mountains meeting the Pacific ocean behind them.

https://iohk.io/press/

Ouroboros, developed by a team led by IOHK chief scientist Aggelos Kiayias, made it through a tough admission process for the prestigious conference. This year, 311 papers were submitted and of those 72 were accepted. Only three papers at the conference were on the subject of blockchain. All three papers were supported by IOHK funding.

Speaking after his presentation, Professor Kiayias said: “We’re very happy that we had the opportunity to present Ouroboros at the conference. The protocol and especially its security analysis were very well received by fellow cryptographers.”

“Our next steps will be to focus on the next version of the protocol, Ouroboros Praos which improves even further the security and performance characteristics of the protocol.”

The Ouroboros protocol stands out as the first proof of stake algorithm that is provably secure, meaning that it offers security guarantees that are mathematically proven. This is essential for a protocol that is intended to be used in cryptocurrency, an infrastructure that must be relied on to carry billions of dollars worth of value. In addition to security, if blockchains are going to become infrastructure for new financial systems they must be able to comfortably handle millions of users. The key to scaling up is proof of stake, a far more energy efficient and cost effective algorithm, and as such this research represents a significant step forward in cryptography. Ouroboros also has the distinction of being implemented – the protocol will be an integral part of Cardano, a blockchain system currently in development.

https://iohk.io/research/papers/#XJ6MHFXX

https://iohk.io/projects/cardano/

There were two other papers presented at the bitcoin session on Monday. The Bitcoin Backbone Protocol with Chains of Variable Difficulty, was produced by a team of three researchers and included Prof Kiayias. It is a continuation of previous research into Bitcoin, which was itself the first work to prove security properties of its blockchain.

A third paper on the subject of bitcoin was presented, Bitcoin as a Transaction Ledger: A Composable Treatment.

Other notable talks at the conference included a presentation by John Martinis, an expert on quantum computing and former physics professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, who is now working at Google to build a quantum computer.

Leading cryptographers at the conference included Whitfield Diffie, pioneer of the public key cryptography that made Bitcoin possible, and Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, who came up with the RSA public-key cryptosystem that is widely used for secure data transmission.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/amycastor/2017/08/23/at-crypto-2017-blockchain-presentations-focus-on-proofs-not-concepts/#6e558d1a7b70

https://iohk.io/team/aggelos-kiayias/

https://iohk.io/team/bernardo-david/

https://iohk.io/team/peter-gazi/

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See more at: https://iohk.io    

Get our latest news updates: https://iohk.io/blog/

Meet the team: https://iohk.io/team/

Learn about our projects: https://iohk.io/projects/cardano/

Read our papers: http://iohk.link/paper-ouroboros

Visit our library: https://iohk.io/research/library/

In the press: https://iohk.io/press/

Work with us: https://iohk.io/careers/

See more on Cardano: https://iohk.io/projects/cardano/

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