Livestream: https://northwestern.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=6b96b2ae-0a1b-4e9d-af3d-abc100e82eb9

Title:

The Nakamoto Consensus and Its Probabilistic Security Guarantee

Abstract

The Nakamoto consensus is at the core of many peer-to-peer blockchain systems, including the well-known bitcoin network. In this lecture, we describe a continuous-time probabilistic model for mining and blockchains. We impose no restrictions on adversarial miners except for an upper bound on their aggregate mining rate. The only assumption about the mining network is that block propagation delays are bounded. We develop the first published rigorous proof of the Nakamoto consensus' security guarantee in continuous time. In particular, but for a small probability exponential in k, a transaction that is k-deep in some credible blockchain remains permanent in all future credible blockchains.

Biography

Dongning Guo joined the faculty of Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA, in 2004, where he is currently a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He received the B.Eng. degree from the University of Science and Technology of China, the M.Eng. degree from the National University of Singapore, and the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA. He was an R&D Engineer in the Center for Wireless Communications (now the Institute for Infocom Research), Singapore, from 1998 to 1999.

He has held visiting positions at Norwegian University of Science and Technology in summer 2006, at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2010-2011, and at Massachusettes Institute of Technology in 2014-2015. He has been an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, an Editor of Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory, and a Guest Editor for the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

Dongning Guo received the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award in 2007, the IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications in 2010, and the Best Paper Award at the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference in 2017.

His research interests are in information theory, communications, networking, and signal processing, with applications to the Internet of Things and 5G cellular networks.