6th Heidelberg Laureate Forum

COMSYS researchers Roman Matzutt and Martin Henze gave invited talk on blockchain weaknesses

On September 25, 2018, COMSYS researchers Roman Matzutt and Martin Henze gave an invited talk at the 6th Heidelberg Laureate Forum, a special conference bringing together awardees of the highest prizes in mathematics and computer science (Abel Prize, ACM A.M. Turing Award, ACM Prize in Computing, Fields Medal, and Nevanlinna Prize) and young researchers from all over the world.

This year's edition of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum featured a special hot topic session on blockchain technology, which investigated the current state of its current technical foundations as well as recent applications that benefit from utilizing a blockchain. In this hot topic session, Roman and Martin discussed challenges and potential remedies regarding the actual content stored on a blockchain. In the first part of the talk, Roman talked about the problems stemming from arbitrary and thus potentially illicit or objecitonable content being stored directly on the blockchain (see here for further details). Afterwards, Martin presented our research on blockchain truncation, a current topic that was also brought up by the previous hot topic presentations by IBM Fellow C. Mohan and Donald Kossmann, director of the Microsoft Research Lab in Redmond.

Following the presentations, Roman and Martin joined a panel discussion with C. Mohan, Donald Kossmann, and ACM A. M. Turing Award laureate Silvio Micali, who presented his scalable public blockchain, Algorand, earlier that day. The panel discussion was moderated by Eva Wolfangel, who was recently awarded Europe's science writer of the year 2018. The panel mainly focussed on the potential of blockchain technology and what makes a scenario where application of blockchain technology yields true benefits.

Both the presentation and the panel discussion are available on YouTube.