AMA Highlights: Avalanche

Raymond Reijnders
It’s great to have you here with us today. Can you please kick off this AMA with an introduction to yourself and Avalanche?

Emin Gün Sirer
I’m the CEO of Ava Labs, a professor at Cornell University in computer science, and a co-director of the main blockchain research institute called IC3, also known as ‘Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts’.

I’ve been in cryptocurrency since 2002. So that predates Bitcoin by a bunch of years. I built the first currency based on Proof of Work mining, called Karma, and published it in 2003 (though Satoshi’s invention added a significant improvement to Karma by folding in the consensus protocol into the Proof of Work, and he designed his system to replace fiat whereas Karma was intended mainly as a virtual currency for use in peer to peer applications).

After that, I worked on decentralization of consensus protocols, invented something called vaults, found the biggest weakness in Bitcoin and other PoW currencies, built the fastest Layer-2 solution to date, called out some of the attack vectors that The DAO hacker used, and generally worked hard to educate the public and policymakers about blockchain technologies.

Most recently, I’ve been working on the Avalanche systems.

Rowan Zwiers
Can you easily explain this biggest weakness you’ve found in Bitcoin and likewise systems?

Emin Gün Sirer
Sure. Back in 2013, Professor Ittay Eyal and I looked carefully into Bitcoin’s consensus protocol and discovered that some key properties that everyone took for granted were simply not true. Specifically, if a miner were to not do what Satoshi said, but follow a slightly different strategy when announcing blocks, he could force the other miners to waste their effort on solving stale block puzzles. This would then eventually confer a potentially significant advantage to the attacker, for instance, with 49% of the hash power, he can collect close to 100% of the rewards!

This strategy is called ‘selfish mining’, and it invalidated some of the folk theorems that everyone including Satoshi believed about the protocol.

We provided a fix for selfish mining attacks launched by small miners, but the problem is not fixable when launched by big miners. So we all have to be diligent to make sure that miners do not exceed the 33% threshold when selfish mining attacks become dangerous.

Source: https://medium.com/hillrise-research/ama-highlights-avalanche-cd5e3ce8893f?source=rss——-8—————–cryptocurrency