The man in the focus of our story today, Emin Gün Sirer, is a professor for computer science at the prestigious Cornell University and one of the most prolific contributors to both Bitcoin and Ethereum (articles on these two blockchains will come soon!).

His journey, that ultimately led him to be one of the most influential academics in the blockchain space, started all the way back in the early 2000s, when he was writing his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering.

But this story has even older and deeper roots.

In the late 90s the explosive growth of the internet had put an enormous strain on network bandwidth. How so?

Well, the internet was originally designed as a peer-to-peer system, meaning that the different computers communicated directly with each other. During the years, this system model slowly changed and the internet became dominated by a so called client / server model though.

Instead of all the computers talking to each other directly, now there were a selected few servers to which all the computers connected in order to get whatever they wanted.

This centralized architecture was responsible for the above mentioned strain on network bandwidth.

Flash forward into the early 2000s, when a revolution was happening which turned the established network model on it’s head: peer-to-peer services that turned passive users into active participants. Newly user created search engines, virtual supercomputers and filesystems like Napster where rapidly gaining popularity and traction.

While the theory behind the most of these systems sounded really nice, they encountered a big problem, also known as the Tragedy of the commons.

The tragedy of the commons is a situation, which was first stipulated by British economist William Forster Lloyd who described how unregulated grazing on common land could have diametral consequences for all participating farmers.

Let’s imagine a village with a big and lush green meadow in the middle. All the villagers who live there, have some small herds with a couple of dozen sheep each.

Photo by George Hiles

They all have agreed to limit their respective herds to 24 sheeps each, in order to stop overgrazing. One day, one of the farmers decides to add two sheeps to his herd. He was sure that nobody would notice. Now imagine what happens if every farmer starts to think like that. Slowly but surely their common resource (the meadow) will be overgrazed and become destroyed.

In 1968, the American ecologist and philosopher Garrett Hardin popularized the concept by putting the situation into a modern context, whereby commons is synonymous for public ressources, any space of public value that needs protection. Possible cases of such tragic misuses can be found in pollution of the air and water, for example, in this case reversing the logic of taking something away, but rather adding something, in this case pollutants.

The ramifications for the peer-to-peer systems were equally challenging: