First Principles Ep. 1 Bitcoin gets credited with inventing trustless consensus. It didn’t. The problem was named in the 1980s, and it took the research world years to even notice Satoshi had solved it. A new series hosted by Tim Roughgarden, with Ittai Abraham. 00:00 Introduction to First Principles:... The Scientific Roots of Blockchain Technology 00:56 Why consensus matters for blockchains 02:30 Byzantine agreement: The old computer science problem Bitcoin made practical 04:34 Blockchains as a shared system of record: State machine replication and blockchain state 06:41 How two research worlds — distributed computing and crypto — began to converge 07:49 Proof of work vs. proof of stake 09:27 Why Ethereum’s move to proof-of-stake took years 11:08 When crypto rediscovered decades of distributed systems research 12:49 Throughput, latency, and modern consensus design 14:05 DAG-based protocols and faster blockchains 15:25 Peace time vs. war time: why modern blockchains need two modes 16:47 Theory, practice, and the future of blockchain researchshow more

A handful of ideas hold up the entire digital world, but most of us never learn where they came from. So we went to the source: the people who solved these problems, and won Turing Awards and Nobel Prizes for it. First Principles, hosted by @Tim_Roughgarden. First episode out now.

First Principles Ep. 2 w/ Barbara Liskov Every blockchain alive today leans on replication ideas worked out in the 1980s, by a Turing Award winner who wasn’t thinking about how it might apply to money at all. Hosted by @Tim_Roughgarden with @ittaia. 00:00 How do systems stay reliable when parts fail? 01:18 Barbara Liskov’s path from programming languages to distributed systems 05:45 Why modularity is “everything” 07:22 The replication problem: keeping data available across many machines 09:58 Viewstamped replication and the “ledger” before blockchains 16:32 Why good research starts with what you don’t understand 18:10 Leslie Lamport, Paxos, and the inevitability of ideas in the right time, in the right place 21:48 Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance: what changes when replicas can lie 19:35 How PBFT bridged theory and practical systems 22:38 Why you should never trust an individual replica 28:39 Why blockchains are state machine replication in the wild 31:27 AI, verification, and the future of computer science

First Principles Ep. 3 with Leslie Lamport Before blockchains could reach consensus, Leslie Lamport had to define what agreement even meant when computers fail, lie, or disappear. Hosted by @Tim_Roughgarden with @ittaia. 00:00 The problem every blockchain is built to solve 02:52 Why concurrent systems are surprisingly tricky 04:40 The origins of the bakery algorithm 07:37 What does it mean for a protocol to be “correct”? 12:03 The origins of the Byzantine Generals problem — and what happens when some computers fail 17:49 How Paxos emerged from an attempted impossibility proof 23:47 Why theory and practice need each other 33:48 Government funding, DARPA, and the long arc of foundational research

@Tim_Roughgarden @ittaia Looking forward to watching this. Go Bitcoin Go!

@Tim_Roughgarden @ittaia Bitcoin is the result

@Tim_Roughgarden @ittaia Bookmarked. Will listen.

@Tim_Roughgarden @ittaia critical deep lore

@Tim_Roughgarden @ittaia lore for days

@Tim_Roughgarden @ittaia

@Tim_Roughgarden @ittaia BM25 beating billion-parameter models at search is the kind of plot twist nobody predicted.

@Tim_Roughgarden @ittaia

@Tim_Roughgarden @ittaia The naming was Lamport, Shostak and Pease in 1982, the Byzantine Generals Problem. And Satoshi knew it cold. In a 2008 mailing list reply he reframed Bitcoin as a Byzantine Generals solution, generals agreeing on an attack time through proof of work.

@Tim_Roughgarden @ittaia 😓

@Tim_Roughgarden @ittaia @ArAIstotle granular factcheck

@Tim_Roughgarden @ittaia What part of the 1980s Byzantine agreement research did Satoshi actually improve on that the field had overlooked?

@pmarca @Tim_Roughgarden @ittaia It's over... the moment has passed