Recently, Professor Aggelos Kiayias, Chief Scientist at blockchain technology company\u00a0IOHK, talked about blockchain interoperability, energy consumption, and security, in particular discussing Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Cardano, and quantum cryptography.<\/p>\n
Professor Kiayias\u2019 comments were made during an interview with \u201cCyber Protection Magazine\u201d (a publication that discusses cyber security \u201cin terms the C-suite and business leaders can understand\u201d), which was published as an article on Friday (June 4).<\/p>\n
On Security Issues of Existing Blockchains<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201c\u2026 Elon Musk has talked about speeding up Dogecoin, but how fast can one\u00a0 make block production in a cybercurrency before it becomes too brittle? As we have shown in\u00a0recent work, the number of blocks that the network produces in given length of time each block travels the network in a predictable time and an adversary can be held off by the miners following established protocols. However, if one dares to increase that travel time by an order of magnitude as Musk suggests without making any fundamental modifications in the underlying protocol design, protection against adversaries decreases accordingly.<\/em>\u201c<\/p>\n On Energy Consumption of Blockchain Consensus Mechanisms<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cEnergy inefficiency is built into Bitcoin and will only worsen, as its price rises\u2026 Bitcoin draws its security from the energy-intensive \u2018proof of work\u2019 process, in which Bitcoin miners use their computing power to compete to solve random, complex cryptographic puzzles, with the first to solve the puzzle earning the right to mint the next block of data on the Bitcoin ledger\u2026 As an answer to this, we have developed a highly energy efficient \u2018proof-of-stake\u2019 protocol, and were the first to\u00a0 formally propose such a system and have it accepted for publications to a major Cryptology Conference\u2026 The Ouroboros protocol sees the entire global blockchain network powered with the energy usage of just a single family home.<\/em>\u201c<\/p>\n On Blockchain Interoperability<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201c\u2026 blockchain companies need to build solutions that can work together. Cardano is unique because it was built with interoperability in mind, and a lot of our work is focussed on making blockchain systems work with each other via our work on interoperability.<\/em>\u201c<\/p>\n