Tendermint: Byzantine Fault Tolerance in the age of Blockchains

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Ethan Buchman (Tendermint)
• Tuesday 08 November 2016, 15:00-16:00
• FW26, Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Liang Wang.

Tendermint is a new protocol for ordering events in a distributed network under adversarial conditions. More commonly known as Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus or atomic broadcast, the problem has attracted significant attention in recent years due to the widespread success of blockchain-based digital currencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, which successfully solve the problem in a public setting without a central authority. Tendermint modernizes classic academic work on the subject by simplifying the design of the BFT algorithm and utilizing the blockchain paradigm, which amortizes the overhead of BFT and allows for faster recovery from leader failure. Furthermore, Tendermint uses a simple socket protocol to enable BFT state machine replication of arbitrary deterministic state machines, written in any programming language. Our implementation in Go achieves thousands of transactions per second on dozens of nodes distributed around the globe, with latencies of about one second, and performance degrading moderately in the face of adversarial attacks. This talk will provide an overview of how Tendermint works and how to build BFT applications with it, including scalable crypto-currencies

Bio – Ethan Buchman is an Internet Biophysicist. With background in cell biology, neuroscience, machine learning, and distributed computing, his goal is to build tools that encourage humans to self-organize into functional systems, much like molecules managed to self-organize into Life. With this goal in mind, he led blockchain development at Monax Industries, contributed to multiple implementations of Ethereum, and is currently the CTO and a core developer at Tendermint. He also ran for Member of Parliament in Toronto in the 2015 Canadian federal election and is obsessed with farming and fermented foods.

This talk is part of the Computer Laboratory Systems Research Group Seminar series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• CL's SRG seminar
• Cambridge Centre for Data-Driven Discovery (C2D3)
• Cambridge talks
• Chris Davis' list
• Computer Laboratory Systems Research Group Seminar
• Department of Computer Science and Technology talks and seminars
• FW26, Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building
• Interested Talks
• School of Technology
• Trust & Technology Initiative - interesting events
• bld31
• ndk22's list
• ob366-ai4er
• rp587

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.