Tim Roughgarden
Tim Roughgarden is a Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and Head of Research at a16z crypto. He works on the boundary of computer science and economics, focusing on the design, analysis, applications, and limitations of algorithms, with particular emphasis on game theory and microeconomics as applied to networks, auctions, and blockchains. He is known for his research on transaction fee mechanism design for Ethereum (EIP-1559), permissionless consensus, and automated market making, as well as his lecture series on foundations of blockchains covering state machine replication and consensus protocols.
“Turing Complete blockchain protocols, like Ethereum, Solana, et cetera, they're almost like literal implementations of the fully general state machine replication problem.”
Source→“Blockchains were sort of launched with Bitcoin protocol, which actually looks rather different than PBFT and most of the other consensus protocols anyone had thought about to that time.”
Source→“Accountability says the only way to create a consistency violation is by signing lots of inconsistent things. And then through inspection, you can actually identify bad actors who double signed on different conflicting states.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.