BFT in the lens of Blockchains and Blockchains in the lens of BFT

Dahlia Malkhi, VMWare Research

Blockchain is a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) replicated state machine, in which each state-update is by itself a Turing machine with bounded resources. The core algorithm for achieving BFT in a Blockchain appears completely different from classical BFT algorithms:Recent advances in blockchain technology blur these boundaries. Namely, hybrid solutions such as Byzcoin, Bitcoin-NG, Hybrid Consensus, Casper and Solida, anchor off-chain BFT decisions inside a PoW chain or the other way around. This talk keynote will describe Blockchain in the lens of BFT and BFT in the lens of Blockchain, and provide common algorithmic foundations for both.