Ling Ren
Nov 18, 2016 at 12:00 PM in 380 Soda Hall
Title:Solidus: An Incentive-compatible Cryptocurrency Based on Permissionless Byzantine Consensus
Abstract: The decentralized cryptocurrency Bitcoin has experienced great success. It has also encountered many challenges, including the low throughput and long confirmation time of transactions, and the lack of incentives to follow the protocol at multiple steps. To address these challenges, we propose Solidus, a decentralized cryptocurrency based on a Byzantine consensus protocol adapted to the permissionless setting. We design each component of Solidus to be incentive compatible. With these techniques, our protocol has the potential to improve throughput and confirmation time, and provides safety and liveness assuming a supermajority of participants are rational (the rest are Byzantine) and no large coalition exists. This is ongoing joint work with Ittai Abraham, Dahlia Malkhi, Kartik Nayak and Alexander Spiegelman.
Bio: Ling Ren is a Ph.D. student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds a Masters in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT and a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua University. His research interests are in computer security, applied cryptography and computer architecture. While at MIT, he has worked on secure processors, Oblivious RAMs, and proof-of-work algorithms.