Polkadot Beijing Meetup: Web3.0 Visions, Privacy Protection, Consensus and Trust
Under the co-sponsorship of Web3 Foundation, Polkadot, and pLIBRA, Polkadot meetup was successfully held on 24 September 2019 at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. With Dr. Gavin Wood, Dr. Alistair, and Hang Yin, founder of pLIBRA acting as honored guests, this event attracted more than 150 Polkadot fans and Tsinghua University students.
Privacy Protection Technology in Web3.0
As the first speaker, Hang Yin, the founder and lead developer of pLIBRA made a keynote speech on Privacy Protection Technology in Web3.0.
In this speech, Hang Yin talked about the concern about privacy brought by Facebook’s blockchain project Libra. In response to this concern, Yin stated that, based on confidential cross-chain interoperable technology, pLIBRA will connectLibra to other blockchains so that the cross-chain transactions are untraceable, and thereby user privacy can be safeguarded. As far as Yin is concerned, a true smart contract should be not only Turing-complete but also confidentiality-preserving, just as Phala Network.
According to Yin, Phala Network could guarantee the confidentiality of smart contracts by a blockchain-TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) hybrid system (TEE). Thus pLIBRA built upon Phala Network can enhance the privacy of Libra and achieve the vision of Web3.0
How the NPoS consensus algorithm of Polkadot helps ensure security
Web3 Foundation Researcher Dr. Alistair Stewart made a keynote speech on NPoS (Nominated Proof of Stake). As far as Dr. Alistair is concerned, a security guarantee is based on the economic model. For example, under the PoW consensus, blockchain security is guaranteed on the premise that most miners are honest and in good faith; while under PoS consensus, security is guaranteed on the premise that most token holders are rational and active.
The network security solution adopted by Polkadot referred to the election method proposed by Swedish mathematician Edvard Phragmén in 1895. In accordance with this method, among the 100 to 1000 highly qualified validators, as long as more than 2/3 validators are honest, then the security of the relay chain can be guaranteed, as well as that of parachains. If randomly selected small portion of validators are all malicious, Polkadot has set in place complimentary security mechanisms, such as Fisherman and slashing mechanism.
From “Trust” to “Truth”
As the last speaker, Dr. Gavin Wood, the founder of Polkadot, delivered a wonderful speech, in which he expounded his personal understanding of trust and truth from philosophical, economic, and technological perspectives.
Dr. Gavin started by explaining the difference between trust and truth. In his opinion, “trust” indicates that we must believe in a third-party before we can interact with the world, while “truth” suggests that we must use principles and models to rationally analyze the world. As far as Dr. Gavin is concerned, trust is almost the same with belief, indicating how much an individual believes in another individual, a group of individuals, or an organization. As stated by Dr. Gavin, “We now often make judgments on whether an individual or organization is ‘trustworthy’ or not based on superficial information, but the judgment is not the truth. Fortunately, crypto-economics can help build a reliable and trustworthy system that can function well without trust, and thus the system itself can provide us with accurate results”.
After that, Gavin introduced three products of Polkadot, which are parachain, part thread, and bridge. Polkadot is a network for network, and aims to eventually become a network for the network of network. You can connect your own blockchains to Polkadot for greatest security and best performance in three interchangeable methods, namely parachain, parathread, and switch bridge. Among the three, parathread enjoys the lowest cost and highest flexibility, parachain enjoys the greatest security, while the bridge enjoys the best connectivity.
