Event recap | Polkadot in Tsinghua
Realizing Web3.0 visions on Polkadot — a symposium on Privacy Protection, Consensus and Trust
Under the co-sponsorship of Web3 Foundation, Polkadot and pLIBRA, Polkadot meetup was successfully held on 24 September 2019 at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. With Dr. Gavin Wood, Dr. Alistair and Hang Yin, founder of pLIBRA acting as honored guests, this event attracted more than 150 Polkadot fans and Tsinghua University students.
Privacy Protection Technology in Web3.0
As the first speaker, Hang Yin, the founder and lead developer of pLIBRA made a keynote speech on Privacy Protection Technology in Web3.0. In this speech, Hang Yin talked about the privacy concerns sparked by Facebook’s blockchain project: Libra.
In response to this concern, Yin declared that based on confidential, cross-chain interoperability technology, pLIBRA will connect Libra to other blockchains so that cross-chain transactions are untraceable, and thereby user privacy can be safeguarded.
As far as Yin is concerned, a true smart contract should be not only Turing-complete but also confidentiality-preserving, just like Phala Network. According to Yin, Phala Network could guarantee the confidentiality of smart contracts by a blockchain-TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) hybrid system .
Thus, pLIBRA, built upon Phala Network, can enhance the privacy of Libra and achieve the vision of Web3.0.
How the NPoS consensus algorithm of Polkadot helps ensure security
Web3 Foundation Researcher Dr. Alistair Stewart made a keynote speech on NPoS (Nominated Proof of Stake).
As far as Dr. Alistair is concerned, security guarantee is based on economic model. For example, under the PoW consensus, blockchain security is guaranteed on the premise that most miners are honest and in good faith; while under PoS consensus, security is guaranteed on the premise that most token holders are rational and active.
The network security solution adopted by Polkadot referred to the election method proposed by Swedish mathematician Edvard Phragmén in 1895.
In accordance with this method, among the 100 to 1000 highly qualified validators, as long as more than 2/3 validators are honest, then the security of the relay chain can be guaranteed, as well as that of parachains.
If randomly selected small portion of validators are all malicious, Polkadot has set in place complimentary security mechanisms, such as Fisherman and slashing mechanism.
From “Trust” to “Truth”
As the last speaker, Dr. Gavin Wood, the founder of Polkadot, delivered a wonderful speech, in which he expounded his personal understanding of trust and truth from philosophical, economic and technological perspectives.
Dr. Gavin started by explaining the difference between trust and truth. In his opinion, “trust” indicates that we must believe in a third-party before we can interact with the world, while “truth” suggests that we must use principles and models to rationally analyze the world. As far as Dr. Gavin is concerned, trust is almost the same with belief, indicating how much an individual believes in another individual, a group of individuals or an organization.
As stated by Dr. Gavin, “We now often make judgement on whether an individual or organization is ‘trustworthy’ or not based on superficial information, but judgement is not truth.”
“Fortunately, crypto-economics can help build a reliable and trustworthy system which can function well without trust, and thus the system itself can provide us with accurate results.”
After that, Gavin introduced three products of Polkadot, which are parachain, parathread and bridge. Polkadot is a network for network, and aims to eventually become a network for network of network. You can connect your own blockchains to Polkadot for greatest security and best performance in three interchangeable methods, namely parachain, parathread and switch bridge. Among the three, parathread enjoys lowest cost and highest flexibility, parachain enjoys greatest security, while bridge enjoys best connectivity.
TIBA is an organization where activities are managed by students of Tsinghua University interested in the applicability and pervasive potential of blockchain technology.
Being key in the organization of events like the Polkadot meetup at the FIT building in Tsinghua University, their aim is to connect the industry leaders with the academia at Tsinghua, the Chinese and the international student communities, and all parties interested in blockchain so as to give them a platform for the dissemination of blockchain related news and information.
The Polkadot event was a booming success and TIBA plans to continue pushing the envelope in educating the community at Tsinghua about all blockchain-related technology, news and events.
This article was written by the pLIBRA team and edited by Brian Seong. Photos were taken by the pLIBRA team.
