Bitcoin’s approach to solving the double spending problem is to make a collusion and attack on the network prohibitively expensive. One of the main factors that will determine Bitcoin’s chance of survival in the long-term is whether the behavior that maximizes the profits of miners contributes to or sabotages the health of the network. The game theory that determines this is complex and our understanding of it still incomplete. But research is increasing and two people who have been at the forefront of this work are , a professor in computer science at Cornell University, and Ittay Eyal, a post-doc at the same department. They joined us for a fascinating discussion of their work on ‘selfish mining’, the incetive structure that underlies Bitcoin and their recent positive conclusions from the Miner’s Dilemma. Topics covered in this episode: Emin Gün Sirer’s early interest in cryptocurrencies and work on a cryptocurrency to incentivize bittorrent users in 2004 What selfish mining is and how miners could profit from withholding blocks How an attacker would execute a selfish mining attack Why the miner’s dilemma implies that the equilibrium might be small mining pools Why the lack of security of clients and servers is holding back adoption Episode links: Selfish Mining paper (PDF) Miner's Dilemma blog post Miner's Dilemma paper (PDF) Hacking, Distributed Meni Rosenfeld's paper on mining pool reward systems (PDF) This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/076

The cryptocurrency ecosystem is increasingly divided into different camps. There are those betting and working on the eventual mainstream success of Bitcoin. And there are those who take elements of Bitcoin’s technology and repurpose them to improve existing systems. Hyperledger is one of the projects firmly in the latter camp. They are envisioning a world where innumerable interoperable ledgers are operated by different parties. Hyperledger is their tool for the creation and management of these ledgers. CEO Dan O’Prey and CTO joined us for a discussion of the project, underlying technology and their view of where the cryptocurrency ecosystem is going. Topics covered in this episode: Why Hyperledger is trying so solve a fundamentally different problem than Bitcoin How networks consisting of known parties can have massive performance and scalability advantages over anonymous networks Why Hyperledger doesn’t have or need its own currency How Hyperledger can vary the degree of decentralization and security depending on use-case Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) Episode links: Hyperledger Meher Roy’s Internet of Money Whitepaper Practical Bynzantine Fault Tolerance This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/073