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:

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

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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Episode 155: Testing PoW Consensus Algorithm Security with Ren Zhang from Nervos 55:37 Share

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Episode 155: Testing PoW Consensus Algorithm Security with Ren Zhang from Nervos