Sustainable Blockchains
Talk by Krzysztof Pietrzak
Location: TU Wien,
Date/Time: 2024-11-25 16:00 ‒ 17:00
Abstract: The Bitcoin blockchain achieves consensus in an open setting, i.e., where everyone can participate. This was believed to be impossible, the key idea to make this possible was to use computing power rather than some kind of identities for voting through “proofs of work”. Unfortunately, this approach is not sustainable: the Bitcoin blockchain burns roughly as much electricity as a country like Austria. We will outline sustainable alternatives for achieving a Bitcoin-like blockchain, with a focus on using disk space instead of computation and how this is realized in the Chia Network blockchain.
The talk is a part of the Public Lecture Series ‘Sustainability in Computer Science’ under the auspices of Informatik Austria.
Bio: Krzysztof Pietrzak is a Professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) and leads the cryptography group. He earned his PhD in computer science from ETH Zurich in 2005. Before joining IST, he spent five years as a postdoc at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam, and prior to that, one year as a postdoc at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. His current research interests include leakage and tamper-resilient cryptography, key derivation, and pseudoentropy.