rplust

I am leaving Cambridge after a few days spent for a workshop on fast finality, concurrent with other workshops on post-quantum crypto and formal verification. Quick takeaways - Faster finality is coming, the research is mature, even as new ideas have come in during the week, the handoff to specifiers and implementers feels well underway. Next catalyst event will be at devcon in a few weeks, with core devs - The performance numbers for post-quantum finality are improving massively, and this is the worst that they’ll ever be. This is significant, it means the penalty from moving to more complex crypto would not require, in my opinion, if the numbers hold up, a deep rearchitecting to move to PQ-secure consensus, in particular when it comes to incentives - The biggest opportunity imo remains networking. Simulations and live experiments are exploring both the current pre-PQ setting, where networking is clearly the bottleneck, and the post-PQ setting, where compute remains the bottleneck. But with PQ compute numbers improving, I wouldn’t be surprised if once again networking becomes the bottleneck All of this is making me extremely bullish that we’ll achieve PQ-secure and faster finality even faster. Many thanks to @yannvon @benjaminion_xyz and @robsaltini for the workshop, and to @corcoranwill and @drakefjustin for hosting us in Cambridge!