Keynote 2: Maurice Herlihy

Amphitheater Charles Mérieux, Place de l’École

Distributed Computing and Blockchains

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are in the news, including lurid stories of drug trafficking, extortion, massive thefts, mysterious identities, and epic technical failures. Nevertheless, such sensationalism should not distract from the possibly transformative effects of the underlying blockchain data structures and algorithms. Many of the problems in this domain are classical problems of distributed computing, and yet our community has so far played little part in recent developments. We will discuss why the distributed computing community (and the SSS community in particular) should pay more attention.