Harmony: Open Consensus for 10 Billion
Abstract:
Dr. Stephen Tse introduces Harmony, a high performance blockchain aiming to serve as the global consensus platform for 10 billion people in the (future) world.
Commentary:
A strong vision for blockchain technology for everyone. Harmony is focused on unifying the best existing research and put it into production. With a team that has built large infrastructure from Google, Apple, Amazon, they have the perspective to build a next generation high performance blockchain protocol.
Notes:
Bring research result to production!
Go to 100k nodes
Smart contract sharding
Can you separate execution with verification
Can we scale to 10 billion people and 100 billion devices
Can we iterate without lawyers
Can smart contract be safe, easy, fast
Java virtual machine makes web applications so boringly reliable for teams of 100+ developers
Run time checks maintain global constraints, termination, resource consumption, balance flow
Formal verification via dependent types, twelf, proverif, coq, guarantees hacker proof before deploy
Writing contracts, as easy as python
Minimal syntax, human have limited cognitive focus on abstractions such as invariants and isomorphism
Functional and process calculations to avoid managing states, type inference as theorem proving to tame structures and complexity
Understand the theories behind dependencies and parametricity versus fat languages
Running contracts as fast as ocaml
Rust engineers, Protocol researchers, compiler writers
