Abstract
>>> Bitcoin is a successful and interesting example of a global scale
>>> peer-to-peer cryptocurrency that integrates many techniques and
>>> protocols from cryptography, distributed systems, and databases. The
>>> main underlying data platform is a blockchain, a scalable fully
>>> replicated structure that is shared among all participants and
>>> guarantees a consistent view of all user transactions by all
>>> participants in the cryptocurrency system. The novel aspect of
>>> Blockchain is that historical data about currency transactions is
>>> maintained in the absence of any central authority. This property of
>>> Blockchain has given rise to the possibility that the future
>>> applications will transition from centralized databases to a fully
>>> decentralized storage based on blockchains. In this talk, we start
>>> by developing an understanding of the basic protocols used in
>>> blockchain, and elaborate on its main advantages and limitations. To
>>> overcome these limitations, we provide the necessary distributed
>>> systems background in managing large scale fully replicated ledgers,
>>> using Byzantine Agreement protocols to solve the consensus problem.
>>> Finally, we expound on some of the most recent efforts to design
>>> scalable and efficient blockchains.
>>>
>>> Speaker Biography
>>>
>>> Divy Agrawal is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of
>>> California at Santa Barbara. His research interests are in the areas
>>> of databases, distributed systems, cloud computing, and big data
>>> infrastructures and analysis. He is the Fellow of the ACM, the IEEE,
>>> and the AAAS. He serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of
>>> Distributed and Parallel Databases and serves on the Editorial
>>> boards of ACM Transactions of Spatial Algorithms and Systems and ACM
>>> Books.