Certified Blockchain Professional - Module 17: Open Research Problems in Blockchain

As previously discussed, I'm doing the Certified Blockchain Professional course. It is self-directed learning, so I'm going through it at my own pace. In order to consolidate my learning, and help organise my thoughts, I'm blogging about my reflections on each module.

These are mostly notes to myself - but I hope if you find something interesting (or incorrect) that you'll leave a comment.

The final chapter of this dreadful book! Will it be an interesting or educational one?

Interoperability is a big problem. Multiple incompatible chains which can't easily communicate with each other. Some research in interledger protocols like Quilt. Also Tendermint which publishes packets from one chain to another - relies on the receiving chain to check the sending chain has published the corresponding packet.

Privacy. All transactions must be public due to its nature. How to obfuscate? Could homomorphic encryption work? What about Zero Knowledge Proofs?

• Indistinguishability Obfuscation
  • Not ready yet
  • Code is scrambled and will only run correctly if run in the right order.
• Homomorphic encryption
  • Ability to run computations on encrypted data without first decrypting it.
• Zero-Knowledge Proofs
  • No explanation given
• CoinJoin
  • A way of money laundering
  • Mix coins together and distribute back to all parties.

Standardisation. Early work being done by ISO/TC 307. There's also OS1 - the open chain standard.

Assignment

Scalable blockchain solutions Read the research paper at https://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/74bc987e6ab4a8478c04950616612f69/main.pdf.

Answer the following questions:

• How can sharding work for scaling blockchains?
  • Separate shards for different functions.
  • Split the consensus plane.
• How speed of PoW based proof works can be improved?
  • Larger blocks
  • Smaller time between blocks
  • Better gossip protocols
  • More efficient use of bandwidth - possibly via a P2P protocol.