Distributed Consensus

Distributed Consensus

Distributed Consensus is the fundamental problem of reaching agreement on a common output over a point-to-point network. While this problem has been studied for many decades, it has recently seen renewed interest in the context of blockchain protocols. In this seminar, we will cover some of the most important results in this area. This fascinating journey will take us from early feasibility/infeasibility results to high-performance algorithms that scale to billions of users.

The seminar will follow a mixed mode of lecturing and presentation by participants. In about half of the lectures, we will focus on classical works from the literature. For the other half, you will be asked to give a 45-minute presentation about a recent paper, which will determine your grade for the seminar.