How to safely improve the scalability while keeping the decentralized nature of the Bitcoin network? During this meetup, two researchers - Ren Zhang from Nervos/KU Leuven, Patrick McCorry from King's College London will share their explorations in two perspectives: consensus optimization and adding other layer 2 support.



Agenda:

6:30-7:00 Check-in and Say Hi



7:00-7:30 #Exploring the Throughput Limit of Nakamoto Consensus# by Ren Zhang



7:30-8:00 # Scaling Cryptocurrencies via State Channels (and how it can be improved in Bitcoin) # by Patrick McCorry



8:00-8:30 Q&A



More info about the topics:



#Exploring the Throughput Limit of Nakamoto Consensus#



A public blockchain relies on consensus algorithms to reach agreement among nodes. Bitcoin has laid the foundation of the PoW consensus, of which the safety has been battle-tested for over ten years.



Ren Zhang (researcher at Nervos) will give an overview of Nervos’ layer 1 consensus, which aims to push Bitcoin's PoW consensus to the extreme: to maximize the throughput and minimize the transaction confirmation latency without sacrificing security.



Presented by _Ren Zhang_ (https://www.esat.kuleuven.be/cosic/people/ren-zhang/), former researcher at Blockstream, currently researcher at Nervos CKB, a public permissionless blockchain (https://github.com/nervosnetwork/ckb). Ren is also a research assistant at KU Leuven. His research areas include blockchain consensus protocols, p2p network security and privacy-preserving technologies.



# Scaling Cryptocurrencies via State Channels (and how it can be improved in Bitcoin) #



State channels let a group of parties transact (and execute a smart contract) locally amongst themselves. The global blockchain is only used to open the channel, close the channel, or to resolve disputes within the group of parties. In this talk, we will provide an overview of how to construct a channel (in both Bitcoin and Ethereum), some experimental results on this scaling solution and highlight its practicality.



Presented by_Patrick McCorry_ (https://nms.kcl.ac.uk/patrick.mccorry/), Assistant Professor at King's College London with a focus on cryptocurrencies, decentralised systems and building cryptographic protocols.



Thanks for the support from SF Bitcoin meetup (https://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Bitcoin-Social/) and Starfish Mission (https://www.meetup.com/Starfish-Mission/).