“Beyond Blockchain: Convergent Consensus“ by Mike Anderson (Strange Loop 2022)

Despite considerable hype over recent years, blockchain technology has often failed to live up to the promise of providing cheap, accessible, high performance decentralised computing. We can do much better: A novel approach to consensus inspired by CRDTs and category theory can make decentralised computation efficient and scalable. Immutable persistent data structures and digital signatures help keep everything secure. In this talk we explore the Convergent Proof of Stake consensus algorithm and demonstrate how it can be used to implement efficient real-time decentralised computation using Convex Lisp, a functional language inspired by Clojure and the lambda calculus. Mike Anderson Managing Director, Convex Foundation @mikera Over a varied career Mike has been CTO at several companies as well as a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Company where Powerpoint and Excel were the development tools of choice. Since the age of eight, Mike has had a passion for writing software and developed a strong interest in open source technology. He is a contributor and maintainer of open source code in the Java and Clojure ecosystems. In a vague attempt to find balance in life, Mike also volunteers his time as a modern jive dance teacher. ------ Sponsored by: ------ Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat.