Interview with the inventor of the Avalanche consensus protocol: Our goal is Wall Street

There is some cold knowledge that you may not know: A few years before Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin paper, someone was already exploring the proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism, which came from Karma developed by Professor Emin Gün Sirer of Cornell University The virtual currency system may be the first network to use the proof-of-work mechanism, which predates Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper by nearly 7 years. Moreover, only people in the academic circle should notice that in the field of cryptocurrency, in addition to Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin white paper, perhaps Professor Emin Gün Sirer’s “selfish mining” strategy is the most cited paper.

Professor Emin Gün Sirer is not only an academic and researcher, but also a typical geek. As a professor at Cornell University, he is not only engaged in research related to cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and distributed systems, but also actively participates in the practice of these fields.

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Prof. Emin Gün Sirer

When cryptocurrency and blockchain have not yet become "obvious", he has full confidence in the future of blockchain technology, he said, "Actually, we didn't know this industry would attract so much attention before. But we are very Clearly, stay in this industry because it's not a one-hit wonder. Cryptocurrencies and blockchain are not a small thing, this is the future of computing.”

What was the "virtual currency system" before the birth of Bitcoin?

Professor Emin Gün Sirer first launched a virtual currency system called "Karma" in 2002. At that time, P2P download tools were popular on the Internet, the most famous of which was BitTorrent, which Chinese netizens called "BT download". The most important feature in BitTorrent is that each node can not only download files, but also need to pay their own bandwidth to upload files, which can help each node in the network achieve faster download speeds. However, because some leeching nodes only download but do not upload, the network is blocked. Professor Emin Gün Sirer said that the Karma system was originally designed to tokenize the actual workload of each participant through the PoW mechanism, so as to build a sustainable system.

Technology Karma, a virtual currency in a P2P system

Unfortunately, at that time, American society was concerned about terrorist activities and terrorist financing, and the promotion of the Karma system would face various regulatory hurdles, so the system has not been commercialized. In 2008, the world encountered a financial crisis, and the masses were full of distrust of the financial environment and financial institutions at that time, which became a good time for the birth of Bitcoin.

Professor Emin Gün Sirer worked at Bell Labs before inventing the virtual currency system "Karma" and getting involved in the cryptocurrency field. Bell Labs, named after the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Bell, is a well-known communication technology research institution, originally established by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T). Professor Emin Gün Sirer was responsible for building the large operating system Plan 9 at Bell Labs, working with Rob Pike and others who later went to Google and invented the Go language.

Mascot for Tech Plan 9

After that, he also worked at the DEC Systems Research Center and Nippon Electric (NEC) before choosing to enter the academic field, focusing on research and practice in distributed systems, operating systems, and networking.

Before the birth of Bitcoin, Professor Emin Gün Sirer has published dozens of academic papers on distributed systems, operating systems and networks, and much of his academic career has focused on the details of distributed systems. Among these studies, he gave Lianwen two examples: one is a system called SPIN, which mainly studies how to perform secure dynamic expansion in a running system, and the other is a system called Nexus, which studies How to make the operating system more secure.

Unlike other traditional academic researchers, he does not only write pure academic papers. The above systems and Karma are not only existing in papers or theories, but real working systems that he and his team have developed together. Some are still being maintained or iterated on today.

Witness the whole process of the growth of the cryptocurrency industry

After the birth of Bitcoin, Professor Emin Gün Sirer quickly became an important academic researcher and supporter of the cryptocurrency industry, with a more direct contribution. He not only published many important academic papers on the cryptocurrency system, but also co-founded the IC3 organization, hoping to promote the infrastructure construction of cryptocurrencies, distributed systems, smart contracts and other technologies by gathering researchers from more universities.

IC3's full name is "The Initiative For CryptoCurrency & Contracts". It was established in 2010 and is a large-scale cross-organizational project funded by the National Science Foundation (The National Science Foundation). Many leaders came from Cornell University. Professors and scholars from other universities continue to join, currently covering about 7 universities, 15 to 20 professors and more than 100 graduate students.

TechnologyThe Initiative For CryptoCurrency & Contracts

IC3 does not focus on Bitcoin, Ethereum or a specific token, their main goal is to study and explore computer science. Professor Emin Gün Sirer said, "I think the most important contribution of IC3 is to define the field of blockchain as a branch of computer science. In fact, we can even say that this field has gone beyond the scope of computer science and formed its own unique field."

Each year IC3 organizes several events that bring together these top academics and researchers in the industry to coordinate and work. It also organizes related industry conferences, sponsored by the American Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a leading computer science research organization.