What PoS cannot achieve (but PoW can) and what PoW cannot achieve, either

More than 75% of crypto-assets by dollar value (over $146 billion) are secured by proof of work. About $1 million in BTC is created every day to compensate miners expending physical resources that secure the system. These are not small numbers, and they will may grow even bigger if PoW cryptocurrencies continue to thrive. What does proof-of-work bring us that was previously believed to be impossible?

In order to avoid PoW's (possibly unnecessary) energy consumption, many new cryptocurrencies turn to other consensus mechanisms for participants to agree on their ledgers, hoping to preserve all PoW's merits. Have they achieved their goals? What do they sacrifice, if anything?

Given non-PoW consensus protocols' limitations, can we further strengthen PoW protocol's security? If so, how? What are the ultimate boundaries of permissionless consensus protocols?

About the speaker:
Ren Zhang's research focuses on consensus protocols and security-related problems in peer-to-peer networks. Ren is currently working on  NC-Max, a variant of Nakamoto Consensus with higher throughput. He is a PhD student of Bart Preneel (designer of RIPEMD 160, the hash function you use to compute from your Bitcoin public key to your Bitcoin address) at COSIC Research Group KU Leuven (the birthplace for AES, the advanced encryption standard which is used in all of your cell phones).

In 2017, after conducting research finding the design flaws in scaling proposed bitcoin unlimited, Ren was invited to intern at Blockstream and worked with Pieter Wullie and Gregory Maxwell. Recently, Ren’s paper “Lay Down the Common Metrics: Evaluating Proof-of-Work Consensus Protocols’ Security” is accepted at IEEESSP (Oakland).

About Nervos:
Nervos (https://www.nervos.org/) is network of scaleable and interoperable blockchains built on top of an open network - which we call the Common Knowledge Base (CKB). CKB is built as a security anchor for all blockchains (and layer 2 protocols such as state channels) in the Nervos network.

Venue sponsored by
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No Rest Labs partners with visionary blockchain brands offering cutting edge solutions to the market. Our technical skill can enhance or create a blockchain solution to ensure companies success by technical advising and development.

MouseBelt
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