Podcasts about byzantine generals

Vishnu Seesahai is a systems architect, mathematician, and former indie film actor. In addition to that, he is a martial artist and he served as a fight choreographer in several films. 01:33 – “Zombie Strippers” and film production 04:00 – Getting into bitcoin mining 10:37 – Decentralized finance 17:15 – Cyber attacks, the energy marketplace, and quantum money 22:38 – Mining costs 30:00 – Why proof-of-work is better than proof-of-stake 35:45 – Decentralized vs centralized authority 41:20 – What is the Fediverse? 42:18 – Elon Musk, space exploration, AI, and workplace racism 47:05 – Technological unemployment (aka robots that will steal our jobs) 49:48 – UBI, Central Bank Digital Currency, and moving money 54:16 – The future we got is not the one we were promised Follow Vishnu's podcast appearances: https://en.padverb.com/vishnuseesahai KMO: https://en.padverb.com/kmo

How Bitcoin solves the Byzantine Generals' Problem

If you pay attention to blockchain and crypto currency, you are sure to hear the phrase consensus algorithm. This concept is fundamental to distributed trust systems like blockchain. In this episode our hosts explain consensus, proof of work, and the Byzantine Generals problem.

NOW - Prague: The Capitol of Crypto w/Maya Bersheva Guest: Maya Bersheva, community manager for the Czech Republic, Binance Just because Prague is more than 1000 years old doesn't mean it's behind the times. In fact, it's the most crypto-friendly city in the world. What does that mean? I certainly don't know. But my guest does! Maya Bersheva of Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, talks about what cryptocurrency and blockchain are, why Prague is one of the world hubs of this stuff, and why crypto is the future. SECTIONS 01:33 - What the heck is crypto? 05:08 - Paralelní Polis & the Institute of Cryptoanarchy - crypto ATMS, the luckiest cup of coffee ever 07:42 - Prague is the #1 crypto city 10:20 - Digital nomadism 13:20 - A possible future for crypto 17:02 - Crypto use cases - Brave browser, we are all influencers, P2P, developing nations, mid-term investment 21:07 - How to crypto 24:51 - Get your crypto on - the world is digital 27:33 - Final Thoughts   Music by Fanette Ronjat   Resources for this topic Binance cryptocurrency exchange Blockchain: The Byzantine Generals' Problem Video on the Byzantine Generals' Problem Paralelní Polis Paralelní Polis Facebook Cryptoanarchy.wiki Institute of Cryptoanarchy Hacker's Congress Prague crowned most crypto-friendly city in the world Trezor digital wallets How To Become A Digital Nomad Best places for digital nomads to live New Zeppelin - a home for digital nomads Amin Rafiee - 100% digital nomad Amin Rafee - Decentralized Governance Interview videos with Amin Rafee What is an ICO? Brave web browser - get paid to watch ads 55,000 Bitcoins video Bitcoin Money book for children by Michael Caras Bitcoin Money book video Magic Internet Money: A Book About Bitcoin by Jesse Berger For events in Prague, go to the Facebook page The Prague Haps  Follow us on social for extras: Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram Other Podcasts by Derek DeWitt DIGITAL SIGNAGE DONE RIGHT - Winner of 2020 Communicator Award of Excellence for Podcasts Series-Corporate Communications and on numerous top 10 podcast lists.  CONSPIRACY CLEARINGHOUSE - A rather skeptical look at conspiracies and mysteries. Each episode will examine conspiracy theories, most of which are not true, a few of which might be a little bit true and even a couple that turned out, in fact, to be true. This is the podcast that dares to look behind the curtain that’s behind the curtain.  

BTC $ - 11,854 Today's guest in the show is Danny Scott @CoinCornerDanny CEO of @CoinCorner and co-founder of @mtSocks. Listen to how Danny explains the Byzantine Generals problem to a 9-year-old and how a university 'professor' delayed Danny's entry into #Bitcoin. What is an exchange and how much work has it taken to build a company in the digital currency space? When does a 'Startup' stop becoming a startup and how does @CoincornerDanny try to keep a startup mentality within the company whilst having to play by the 'regulator's' rules. How did Danny fall into mining for #bitcoin in the early days and how has that shaped his thinking around building a business and helping to educate others. What is #DeFi? Like seriously, wtaf is #DeFi? How does @CoinCornerDanny feel about altcoins, getting trolled by Tron Bots and listing some of the 'Alts' on the exchange? How does @CoinCorenerDanny help educate as many people as possible about #bitcoin with underwear? How did Danny and some of the @coincorner team add contribute to #Bitcoin Core? A huge thanks to @CoinCornerDanny for taking the time to come on the show and discuss all of these topics. Big love to @Adamwoodhams1 for producing the show and @hodlerthanthou for lending us his incredible music. Shoutout for those crazy #BRitcoiners doing great work over at @twentyoneism. Huge respect to @coinfloor.co.uk and @obi for supporting the OnceBITten pod. Full List Of Shills And Mench's: @CoinCorner @MtSocks CoinCorner.com @CoinCornerMolly www.coinfloor.co.uk/bitten www.swanbitcoin.com/oncebitten @Coinfloor - @obi @BillGates @ImShillGates @CharlieShrem - UntoldStories.com @Tesla @github

Tommy discusses the Byzantine Generals Problem.

Kiribto Somali tv waa Goob Aad Baran Karto lacagaha dhijitaalka Ah iyo Tech, yada Blockchain

Byzantine Generals Problem. Find related blog posts in my blog rohitvaidya.dev

Episode Summary   In this week’s episode of Elixir Mix the panel follows up with Wiebe-Marten ("Marten") Wijnja about his talk at Elixir Conf EU, where he spoke about the distributed system his team was working on.    They start by discussing the eight fallacies of distributed computing that Marten talked about in talk. He lays out a couple of the fallacies and invites listeners to watch his talk for all eight. Marten explains that these fallacies most commonly happen to developers who are used to working with a single system. The panel discusses how to be mindful of these mistakes and how developers take for granted of how easy one system is to use.    Marten gives some tool recommendations to help with these fallacies. TLA+ is a small programming language that lets the developer describe their system and it will point out when something is wrong but it works purely on concepts. Erlang quick check implementation is also a tool that will help combat these problems. The last suggestion which was given by the panel is a library called comcast on github that will simulate poor network connections so the developer can see how the system runs on a poor connection.    Marten describes the byzantine problem. Two nodes or generals are trying to agree on something but communication keeps failing. The various outcomes are considered and Mark Ericksen gives an additional example of he and Josh Adams trying to connect to record a podcast, and how the miscommunication could change the outcome. This is a big problem that complicates using a distributed system.    The panel discussed CRDT’s and how they are a better way for nodes to sync up. Marten gives a very simple example of a CRDT as a counter. The panel discusses when to use CRDT’s and when not too. Marten explains what questions to ask before using CRDT’s.    Another way of solving the byzantine problem is by connecting the nodes. The panel discusses the tools they use to connect their nodes. Partisan is one tool, instead of connecting all nodes, each node connects to a specific number of nodes. That way if one node goes down the whole system doesn’t stop, while at the same time not, overwhelming the nodes. Libcluster, another tool, uses Kubernetes and has multiple strategies for connecting nodes so developers can choose the right one for their system.     The panel asks Marten about multicall and abcast. Marten explains that these tools help one node talk to all the other nodes in a cluster, and multicall will gather the results. Multicall also tells the developer which nodes failed to respond to the request. Mark shares an example of using these tools to effectively communicate between gen servers.    In Marten’s talk, he described four distributed databases. The panel asks Marten to talk about each one of them. The first one is mnesia. Marten talks about his first experience with Mnesia and how he thought it was amazing. He soon realized while it is still a great tool it also has its quirks.    He explains that each of these databases has its own quirks. Mnesia doesn't do conflict resolution, that along with a few other things the developer will need to build themselves. This can be a good and bad thing because developers can customize the database to their needs but it’s not ready out of the box. Mark explains the use cases mnesia is good for and even references the mnesia documentation.     Cassandra is the next database Marten describes. Cassandra is the database discord uses. Cassandra does not let developers control their own conflict resolution. It always uses the latest time-stamp and with nodes that can be confusing.    Couchdb is another database they discuss. Again, couchdb is also not made to deal with conflicts. It will either solve them randomly or the developer can opt into resolving it themselves. The panel discusses times when this is useful, such as when connectivity is intermittent.    Riak is the final database and the one Marten’s team chose for their distributed system project. Riak was written in Erlang and is a key-value store and uses CRDT’s. It uses a CRDT conflict resolution. Marten shares his experience using Riak. The panel considers Riak’s history and need for some love.     Marten gives an update on planga, the chat application they were building the distributed system for. Marten explains that during the talk they were in the middle of development. He shares the story of why they wanted a distributed system for this chat application. The client they were doing it for wanted to do video streaming but pulled out in the end. When the client no longer needed the video streaming solution they stopped building the distributed system. Marten is still hopeful they will go back and finish it.    To end the episode Marten shares his programming journey. He started programming at age nine. At age 12 he started doing professional web development. After a few years of that, he started doing some frontend work in JavaScript. Once that got old, bitcoin was getting big so he and some friends got into that. Finally, he got a job doing backend work with Ruby while at university. When he heard about Elixir he was so excited he learned the basics in one weekend and has loved it ever since.  Panelists Mark Ericksen Josh Adams Guest Wiebe-Marten ("Marten") Wijnja Sponsors   Sentry– use the code “devchat” for two months free on Sentry’s small plan Adventures in DevOps My Ruby Story CacheFly Links Wiebe Marten Wijnja - An adventure in distributed programming - ElixirConf EU 2019 https://elixirforum.com/  https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/tla.html  http://www.quviq.com/products/erlang-quickcheck/  https://github.com/tylertreat/Comcast  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault#Byzantine_Generals'_Problem  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-free_replicated_data_type  https://github.com/bitwalker/libcluster  http://partisan.cloud/  http://erlang.org/doc/man/mnesia.html  https://learnyousomeerlang.com/mnesia  How Discord Stores Billions of Messages  https://pouchdb.com/  https://planga.io/  https://riak.com/  https://github.com/basho/riak_core  https://riak.com/where-to-start-with-riak-core/  Using Erlang, Riak and the ORSWOT CRDT at bet365 (...) - Michael Owen - Erlang User Conference 2015  https://hex.pm/packages/effects  https://github.com/graninas/automatic-whitebox-testing-showcase  https://github.com/Qqwy/elixir-riak_ecto3 https://hex.pm/packages/sea  https://twitter.com/WiebeMarten  https://github.com/qqwy/  https://wmcode.nl  https://www.facebook.com/Elixir-Mix  https://twitter.com/elixir_mix Picks Mark Ericksen: ElixirConf YouTube Channel  Josh Adams: Automatic White-Box Testing with Free Monads  Wiebe-Marten ("Marten") Wijnja: https://propertesting.com/  https://globalgamejam.org/ https://polyphasic.net/

Episode Summary   In this week’s episode of Elixir Mix the panel follows up with Wiebe-Marten ("Marten") Wijnja about his talk at Elixir Conf EU, where he spoke about the distributed system his team was working on.    They start by discussing the eight fallacies of distributed computing that Marten talked about in talk. He lays out a couple of the fallacies and invites listeners to watch his talk for all eight. Marten explains that these fallacies most commonly happen to developers who are used to working with a single system. The panel discusses how to be mindful of these mistakes and how developers take for granted of how easy one system is to use.    Marten gives some tool recommendations to help with these fallacies. TLA+ is a small programming language that lets the developer describe their system and it will point out when something is wrong but it works purely on concepts. Erlang quick check implementation is also a tool that will help combat these problems. The last suggestion which was given by the panel is a library called comcast on github that will simulate poor network connections so the developer can see how the system runs on a poor connection.    Marten describes the byzantine problem. Two nodes or generals are trying to agree on something but communication keeps failing. The various outcomes are considered and Mark Ericksen gives an additional example of he and Josh Adams trying to connect to record a podcast, and how the miscommunication could change the outcome. This is a big problem that complicates using a distributed system.    The panel discussed CRDT’s and how they are a better way for nodes to sync up. Marten gives a very simple example of a CRDT as a counter. The panel discusses when to use CRDT’s and when not too. Marten explains what questions to ask before using CRDT’s.    Another way of solving the byzantine problem is by connecting the nodes. The panel discusses the tools they use to connect their nodes. Partisan is one tool, instead of connecting all nodes, each node connects to a specific number of nodes. That way if one node goes down the whole system doesn’t stop, while at the same time not, overwhelming the nodes. Libcluster, another tool, uses Kubernetes and has multiple strategies for connecting nodes so developers can choose the right one for their system.     The panel asks Marten about multicall and abcast. Marten explains that these tools help one node talk to all the other nodes in a cluster, and multicall will gather the results. Multicall also tells the developer which nodes failed to respond to the request. Mark shares an example of using these tools to effectively communicate between gen servers.    In Marten’s talk, he described four distributed databases. The panel asks Marten to talk about each one of them. The first one is mnesia. Marten talks about his first experience with Mnesia and how he thought it was amazing. He soon realized while it is still a great tool it also has its quirks.    He explains that each of these databases has its own quirks. Mnesia doesn't do conflict resolution, that along with a few other things the developer will need to build themselves. This can be a good and bad thing because developers can customize the database to their needs but it’s not ready out of the box. Mark explains the use cases mnesia is good for and even references the mnesia documentation.     Cassandra is the next database Marten describes. Cassandra is the database discord uses. Cassandra does not let developers control their own conflict resolution. It always uses the latest time-stamp and with nodes that can be confusing.    Couchdb is another database they discuss. Again, couchdb is also not made to deal with conflicts. It will either solve them randomly or the developer can opt into resolving it themselves. The panel discusses times when this is useful, such as when connectivity is intermittent.    Riak is the final database and the one Marten’s team chose for their distributed system project. Riak was written in Erlang and is a key-value store and uses CRDT’s. It uses a CRDT conflict resolution. Marten shares his experience using Riak. The panel considers Riak’s history and need for some love.     Marten gives an update on planga, the chat application they were building the distributed system for. Marten explains that during the talk they were in the middle of development. He shares the story of why they wanted a distributed system for this chat application. The client they were doing it for wanted to do video streaming but pulled out in the end. When the client no longer needed the video streaming solution they stopped building the distributed system. Marten is still hopeful they will go back and finish it.    To end the episode Marten shares his programming journey. He started programming at age nine. At age 12 he started doing professional web development. After a few years of that, he started doing some frontend work in JavaScript. Once that got old, bitcoin was getting big so he and some friends got into that. Finally, he got a job doing backend work with Ruby while at university. When he heard about Elixir he was so excited he learned the basics in one weekend and has loved it ever since.  Panelists Mark Ericksen Josh Adams Guest Wiebe-Marten ("Marten") Wijnja Sponsors   Sentry– use the code “devchat” for two months free on Sentry’s small plan Adventures in DevOps My Ruby Story CacheFly Links Wiebe Marten Wijnja - An adventure in distributed programming - ElixirConf EU 2019 https://elixirforum.com/  https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/tla.html  http://www.quviq.com/products/erlang-quickcheck/  https://github.com/tylertreat/Comcast  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault#Byzantine_Generals'_Problem  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-free_replicated_data_type  https://github.com/bitwalker/libcluster  http://partisan.cloud/  http://erlang.org/doc/man/mnesia.html  https://learnyousomeerlang.com/mnesia  How Discord Stores Billions of Messages  https://pouchdb.com/  https://planga.io/  https://riak.com/  https://github.com/basho/riak_core  https://riak.com/where-to-start-with-riak-core/  Using Erlang, Riak and the ORSWOT CRDT at bet365 (...) - Michael Owen - Erlang User Conference 2015  https://hex.pm/packages/effects  https://github.com/graninas/automatic-whitebox-testing-showcase  https://github.com/Qqwy/elixir-riak_ecto3 https://hex.pm/packages/sea  https://twitter.com/WiebeMarten  https://github.com/qqwy/  https://wmcode.nl  https://www.facebook.com/Elixir-Mix  https://twitter.com/elixir_mix Picks Mark Ericksen: ElixirConf YouTube Channel  Josh Adams: Automatic White-Box Testing with Free Monads  Wiebe-Marten ("Marten") Wijnja: https://propertesting.com/  https://globalgamejam.org/ https://polyphasic.net/

Mark Allison has been a freelance IT consultant for 20 years, specialising in data. He works for investment banks, retailers, insurance companies, hedge funds and payment processors. Many of the people he deals with are sceptical about Bitcoin - and have been more so since the crash in its value last year. But Mark is optimistic about Bitcoin’s prospects and has been following the sector closely. Now he’s spending his evenings and weekends building products for Bitcoin SV (BSV). “I see huge potential”, he says. Bitcoin could allow governments and banks to be more transparent. “If we do move over to Bitcoin as a currency ...I think everyone’s going to be better off.” He understands the scepticism among his City and IT colleagues: “because BTC [Bitcoin Core] has these limits in place, it couldn’t scale, so people who did go out and buy Bitcoin and try to use it, were like, ‘well, it’s not actually very good, is it?’.” With transaction fees rising to around $50, its prospects for being used as a global cash seemed “ridiculous”. But Mark says the limits on transactions and high fees were artificial and the appearance of Bitcoin SV (BSV) has given him even more hope because it returns to the ideas of the original Bitcoin White Paper, of which Mark is a huge fan: “When you consider Bitcoin as a whole, I see it like a Michelangelo painting: it’s a thing of beauty. If you look at the economics behind it, all the incentives behind it - how the miners are incentivised - if you look at the computer science breakthrough that happened to solve the Byzantine Generals problem, if you look at the game theory behind it, if you look at the law: all of these elements all come together in one package, and it’s just a beautiful thing.”The developers at nChain are removing many of the limits imposed on BTC, and then “Bitcoin can really realise its potential”. It will make business more efficient by reducing their costs. All it will take it one large business to start using it. Dr Craig Wright, Jimmy Nguyen and others have spoken of the need to achieve massive scaling on the BSV network - and Mark agrees: “we need to scale now”. With the mining block subsidy being halved again next year in line with how Bitcoin was set up, eventually “if there’s not significant volume, then the miners are going to leave - so we’ve got this ticking time bomb”. The answer to that problem is BSV, Mark says. It’s not only a stable platform in terms of the protocol, but nChain is committed to scaling. “If we don’t scale, it’s going to fail,” Mark says. “We need to see consistent large blocks though real world usage”, for instance for data that needs to be immutably stored with proof of existence. To help things along, Mark has been making his own applications for BSV. The first is a Chrome extension for the Handcash wallet. To make it, Mark had to teach himself Javascript, among other things, over two or three weekends. After about a month, he says, he “managed to cobble something together that kind of worked”. You can try the Handcash Handle Converter for yourself: it converts a Handcash handle into a Bitcoin address. Or, thanks to fellow developer Derek Moore, who made use of Mark’s open source project, you can get the same functions on a website, handcash.to.Mark’s second project is an analytics database, SVCharts, which produces Bitcoin trends, such as mining fees: “ultimately what I want to have is a self-service analytics platform.” The project includes an interesting monetisation model using MoneyButton.

Three generals are voting on whether to attack or retreat from their siege of a castle. One of the generals is corrupt and two of them are not. What happens when the corrupted general sends different answers to the other two generals? A Byzantine fault is "a condition of a computer system, particularly distributed computing systems, where components may fail and there is imperfect information on whether a component has failed. The term takes its name from an allegory, the "Byzantine Generals' Problem", developed to describe this condition, where actors must agree on a concerted strategy to avoid catastrophic system failure, but some of the actors are unreliable." The Byzantine Generals' Problem and associated issues in maintaining reliable distributed computing networks is illuminating for both AI alignment and modern networks we interact with like Youtube, Facebook, or Google. By exploring this space, we are shown the limits of reliable distributed computing, the safety concerns and threats in this space, and the tradeoffs we will have to make for varying degrees of efficiency or safety. The Byzantine Generals' Problem, Poisoning, and Distributed Machine Learning with El Mahdi El Mahmdi is the ninth podcast in the AI Alignment Podcast series, hosted by Lucas Perry. El Mahdi pioneered Byzantine resilient machine learning devising a series of provably safe algorithms he recently presented at NeurIPS and ICML. Interested in theoretical biology, his work also includes the analysis of error propagation and networks applied to both neural and biomolecular networks. This particular episode was recorded at the Beneficial AGI 2019 conference in Puerto Rico. We hope that you will join in the conversations by following us or subscribing to our podcasts on Youtube, SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast site/application. You can find all the AI Alignment Podcasts here. If you're interested in exploring the interdisciplinary nature of AI alignment, we suggest you take a look here at a preliminary landscape which begins to map this space. Topics discussed in this episode include: The Byzantine Generals' Problem What this has to do with artificial intelligence and machine learning Everyday situations where this is important How systems and models are to update in the context of asynchrony Why it's hard to do Byzantine resilient distributed ML. Why this is important for long-term AI alignment An overview of Adversarial Machine Learning and where Byzantine-resilient Machine Learning stands on the map is available in this (9min) video . A specific focus on Byzantine Fault Tolerant Machine Learning is available here (~7min) In particular, El Mahdi argues in the first interview (and in the podcast) that technical AI safety is not only relevant for long term concerns, but is crucial in current pressing issues such as social media poisoning of public debates and misinformation propagation, both of which fall into Poisoning-resilience. Another example he likes to use is social media addiction, that could be seen as a case of (non) Safely Interruptible learning. This value misalignment is already an issue with the primitive forms of AIs that optimize our world today as they maximize our watch-time all over the internet. The latter (Safe Interruptibility) is another technical AI safety question El Mahdi works on, in the context of Reinforcement Learning. This line of research was initially dismissed as "science fiction", in this interview (5min), El Mahdi explains why it is a realistic question that arises naturally in reinforcement learning El Mahdi's work on Byzantine-resilient Machine Learning and other relevant topics is available on his Google scholar profile.

*** this is not financial or legal advice*** Have you even wondered why an general from 330AD was still giving us problems to deal with? In this episode Doug Pike of Vericoin and Verium joins Matthew on the show to explain to him this infamous general’s problem. Show Links: CRYPTO101podcast.com Patreon: www.patreon.com/user?u=8429526 Twitter: twitter.com/Crypto101Pod twitter.com/BrycePaul101 twitter.com/PizzaMind www.instagram.com/crypto_101 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/101Crypto/ https://www.facebook.com/CRYPTO101Podcast/ **THIS IS NOT FINANCIAL OR LEGAL ADVICE** © Copyright 2019 Boardwalk Flock, LLC All Rights Reserved Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgZklODDHNc ♫Music By♫●Jay Sarma - Tumak Bhal Pua [Bass Rebels Release] ●Song - https://youtu.be/zgZklODDHNc ●iTunes, Spotify, GooglePlay - http://smarturl.it/TumakBhalPua ⬇️️ DOWNLOAD SONG HERE - http://smarturl.it/TumakBhalPua ♫Support The Artist♫ ●Jay Sarma - http://smarturl.it/JaySarma

Im Fokus der heutigen Episode steht das Problem der byzantinischen Generäle. * Was ist das Byzantine Generals Problem? * Was hat das mit Bitcoin und Blockchain zu tun? * Was ist die Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT)? * Wie funktioniert BFT? * Wo wird BFT angewandt? * Wo ist der unterschied zwischen zentralem und dezentraler BFT?

A quick explanation of what makes blockchain difficult to crack or manipulate!

12 September 2016 - The stars have almost fully aligned. Will and I are both fully functional this week. Sadly, we have no interview or Extra Mad, because we are both frantically catching-up at work, but the show is all new this week and next week, for our 1-year anniversary show, we have an interview I have been trying to get for a while so I'm excited. At the top of the show I talk about the bankruptcy filing by South Korean shipping giant, Hanjin. Sea freight is a canary in the coal mine economic indicator and the sinking of Hanjin speaks volumes. Also, with Christmas on the horizon, the Toy Shippers Association (no joke, there's clearly a club for everyone), is expressing deep concern. It is already apparent that the stranding of so many toys will be putting extra pressure on reindeer-based transport systems on the night of 24 December. Also during the top block, Will, as predicted/promised, gets into the appearance of Nigel Farage at a Trump rally in Mississippi. Fascism is real and it's gone mainstream. The "Lauering" of the bar by the press has allowed it to go unchallenged for years and now we are all reaping the crop of hate so carefully nurtured by the AltRight. In his block Will has some fun talking about the history of tech and projects that failed because they were too far ahead of their time. The Scottish efforts to build a canal across Panama, the Macon and Akron airships and the Apple Newton were all failures. Still, there is a tiny bit of Newton in every iPhone. Eventually, good ideas tend to take root. In my segment I answer the question, what is blockchain? Bitcoin, the first iteration of blockchain, is an interesting experiment but it has substantial limitations. Blockchain itself, however, will have a big future and be used in many applications. It will not replace currency, for reasons I will get into in more detail next week, but it is an important technology which is on the rise. I do spend some time on the technical limitations of blockchain including the Byzantine Generals problem. There are many serious descriptions of this hurdle as it has been an unresolved challenge, both for programmers and applied mathematicians, for nearly forty years but there was one genuinely short but funny article and I promised to link to it here. Both Will and I thank you for sticking with us through the past few weeks. - Carrots! Arliss

Claude Shannon followed up one incredibly important paper with a second of even greater significance. In Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems, he analyzes cryptosystems based on the probabilities of certain plaintext messages given an intercepted cyphertext. Understanding this form of analysis will help us to design more effective systems. The Lambda Calculus computes using nothing but symbol replacement. If we are going to run programs like a computer, we need to express conditional branches. We can represent the value "true" as a function λa.λb.a. In other words, the function that returns the first of two arguments. Similarly, the value "false" is represented by the function λa.λb.b. To create a conditional "if-else" statement, capture two branches and then apply the third argument to select between them: λa.λb.λc.c a b. Suppose that you needed to reach an agreement among several people by passing messages. Now suppose that some of those people could not be trusted. Under what conditions could you find a protocol to reach an agreement? Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak, and Marshall Pease studied the Byzantine Generals problem to determine how to design algorithms for distributed systems.

We just realized that we are in the first dual revolution since 1848! How so? Well, we will tell you! This week, the CEO of iNation, Christian Saucier, designed something to let users submit documents to the blockchain where they can be held securely. With it, users will be able to keep a perfect copy of their passport or deed or will or other legal document in a cryptographically secure place, and be able to access it at anytime using a mobile app. Doesn't that just blow your hair back? We chat about The Byzantine Generals' Problem, as well as why giving your dad bitcoin for his birthday is the most disappointing gift of all-time.