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Hebrew University academics Aviv Zohar and Yonatan Sompolinski joined us to discuss their research at the forefront of blockchain technology. We talked about their early proposals for scaling bitcoin using the GHOST protocol, which later inspired Ethereum. And then we discussed SPECTRE and a new type of network based on directed acrylic graphs (DAG). DAGs abandon the blockchain data structure to allow constant generation of blocks that later get merged achieving block times of seconds and throughput many orders of magnitudes above current blockchain network.

Topics discussed in this episode:

• How Aviv Zohar wrote one of the first academic papers on bitcoin in 2011
• The GHOST protocol and how it could allow much faster block times
• The difference between what Ethereum built and the GHOST protocol
• Why DAG (Directed Acrylic Graphs) have massive advantages over blockchains
• Towards massive on-chain scaling and speed with the SPECTRE Protocol
• Their view on existing DAG-based networks like IOTA and Byteball

Links mentioned in this episode:

• SPECTRE Medium Post
• SPECTRE (full paper)
• Accelerating Bitcoin’s Transactions
• Inclusive Blockchain Protocols
• On Bitcoin and Red Balloons
• Aviv’s Website
• Yonatan’s Website

Sponsors:

• iPrize: International startup competition to build the Machine Economy – http://epicenter.tv/iprize

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Epicenter is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain, S?ƒbastien Couture & Meher Roy.