CRC Seminar Series - Conor McMenamin

Title:

State Machine Replication without Honest Participants

Abstract:

In this talk, I discuss the limitations of current SMR protocols, which depend in some way on the existence of honest-by-default participants, particularly in the age of tokenised SMR protocols. I outline the ByRa model, a framework for player characterisation free of honest participants, and introduce the properties of strong incentive compatibility in expectation and fairness, that are necessary and together sufficient for achieving SMR in the ByRa model. I then describe FAIRSICAL, a sandbox SMR protocol which satisfies these properties, and discuss how the fundamental ideas behind FAIRSICAL could be extended to real-world protocols. The talk will bring a lot of the concepts back to blockchains and cryptocurrencies as they are the main motivators for the work.