How Bitcoin Rewired a Classic Computer Science Problem (ft. Tim Roughgarden and Ittai Abraham)
About this episode
The episode discusses how Bitcoin addressed a classic Byzantine agreement problem in a new way.
Bitcoin often gets credited with inventing trustless consensus. It didn’t. The problem was named decades earlier — in the world of distributed computing — and researchers spent years studying how machines could reach agreement even when some participants were faulty, adversarial, or corrupt. What Bitcoin did was something different: It solved a classic Byzantine agreement problem in a radically new, permissionless setting. And it took the research world years to fully recognize what Satoshi had done.
More episodes of a16z crypto show
- Why auction design matters (ft. Nobel economist Paul Milgrom)
- Why markets fail — and how to fix them (ft. Nobel economist Alvin Roth)
- Leslie Lamport on the Science of Distributed Systems
- Before Blockchains, There Was State Machine Replication (ft. Barbara Liskov and Tim Roughgarden)
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