Bitcoin Wednesday’s 6-Year Anniversary on 3 July 2019 presents cryptographer Ren Zhang, who will compare Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS). Proof of Work is a mathematical algorithm that produces results that are difficult to calculate but easy to verify, the governing principle that secures Bitcoin. Although the PoW concept was first proposed in the early 90s, Satoshi Nakamoto’s novel use of it, described in the Bitcoin white paper, sparked the cryptocurrency revolution.
In his talk for Bitcoin Wednesday Ren will explain what Proof of Work brings us that was previously impossible and how it compares to alternatives like Proof of Stake. He writes:
More than $146 billion in crypto-assets (75% of them worldwide) are secured by Proof of Work. As of June 2019, $1 million worth of Bitcoin is created every day to compensate miners who use physical resources to secure the system. These numers are not small, and it is likely that they will grow even larger if cryptocurrencies continue to thrive.
In order to avoid PoW’s high level of energy consumption, many new cryptocurrencies turn to other consensus mechanisms. How do they match up to Proof of Work? Have they achieved their goals? What do they sacrifice, if anything?
Ren is a cryptography researcher at COSIC Research Group at KU Leuven in Belgium, where he focuses on blockchain consensus protocols and privacy- and security-related problems in peer-to-peer networks. He is currently working on a variant of Nakamoto Consensus with higher throughput known as NC-Max. He is a cryptographer for Nervos, a new Proof-of-Work blockchain, and a research assistant to Bart Preneel, the designer of RIPEMD 160, the hash function used to compute from your Bitcoin public key to your Bitcoin address. Ren’s research group at KU Leuven happens to be the birthplace of AES, the advanced encryption standard used in almost all electronic devices.
In 2017, after Ren discovered design flaws in the Bitcoin Unlimited scaling proposal, he was invited to work with Pieter Wuillie and Gregory Maxwell at Blockstream. His paper, “Lay Down the Common Metrics: Evaluating Proof-of-Work Consensus Protocol’s Security” which he co-authored with Bart Preneel, was presented at the 2019 IEEE SP symposium in Oakland.
https://www.bitcoinwednesday.com/speakers/ren-zhang-cryptographer-ku-leuven-nervos/
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