Testing PoW Consensus Algorithm Security with Ren Zhang from Nervos

In this week’s episode, we revisit the topic of consensus algorithms with Ren Zhang, a researchers at Nervos and previously at imec-COSIC (KU Leuven). We chat about an earlier work he did on evaluating PoW consensus protocols security and explore his more recent work on NC-Max - a consensus protocol that breaks the throughput limit and enables the full utilization of the nodes’ bandwidth in confirming transactions

Here are a few of the links we mention in the interview:

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• Consensus Algorithms & HotStuff with Ittai Abraham
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• Majority is not Enough:Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable
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• FruitChains: A Fair Blockchain
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• RSK technology
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• Subchains: A Technique to Scale Bitcoin and Improve the User Experience
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• Lay Down the Common Metrics: Evaluating Proof-of-Work Consensus Protocols' Security by Ren Zhang & Bart Preneel
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• NC-Max: Breaking the Throughput Limit of Nakamoto Consensus by Ren Zhang, Dingwei Zhang, Quake Wang, Jan Xie and Bart Preneel
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• SquirRL - A recent paper extending the "Lay Down the Common Metrics" paper
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• Markov decision process on Wikipedia
• - Monsters in the Mempool with Dan Robinson from Paradigm
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• Prism: Deconstructing the Blockchain to Approach Physical Limits
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• Alan Szepieniec on Hash Functions & Supersonic SNARKs
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More on Nervos:

For the UTXO Programming Model of Nervos, the best starting point is Ren’s colleague Xuejie Xiao's blog.

An explanation of Nervos DAO

An introduction of the Virtual Machine and smart contract support

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