Before Blockchains, There Was State Machine Replication

The a16z Show

2 DAYS AGO

Overview Shownote Highlights Transcript Chapters Pins

Shownote

Every blockchain today relies on replication techniques first developed in the 1980s by researchers who weren't thinking about cryptocurrencies at all. In this episode, Tim Roughgarden speaks with MIT professor and Turing Award winner Barbara Liskov, one ...

Highlights

In this episode, a Turing Award winner and a16z crypto research partner join the host to trace the intellectual history of distributed systems, from foundational academic research to the core protocols that power modern blockchains. The conversation reveals how ideas developed decades before Bitcoin became the bedrock of today's crypto networks.

10:15

Practical protocols beat locking-based approaches.

22:13

PBFT extended Viewstamped Replication to handle malicious attacks.

31:14

Blockchain protocols are literal implementations of state machine replication.

Chapters

From Programming Languages to Distributed Systems: How a Paper Sparked a New Research Path

00:00

Building Reliable Systems: Viewstamped Replication and the Challenge of Benign Failures

13:12

From Byzantine Faults to Blockchains: How PBFT Became the Foundation of Crypto Networks

25:22

Transcript

Barbara Liskov: When DARPA had recognized that this was a serious problem, the problem of malicious attacks, and was looking for research in that area. I had a student, Miguel Castro, he came to me and he said, why don't we see whether we can figure out a ...