In this episode Erik talks to Aparna Krishnan (@aparnalocked), co-founder of Mechanism Labs and Haseeb Qureshi (@hosseeb), GP at MetaStable Capital.

They discuss a number of themes around Aparna's research paper, talk about what it means to find consensus, and they go through the various protocols that exist now to try and do that. They also talk about what kinds of applications these various protocols could have.

They explain what a block is, what proof of work and proof of stake mean, and why the longest chain rule could be a potential pitfall for Bitcoin.

Reading List For This Episode:

Non- Technical:
- MultiChain's blog
- Ashley Lannquist’s blog
- https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/fileadmin/user_upload/research/centres/alternative-finance/downloads/2018-08-20-conceptualising-dlt-systems.pdf
- https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/375.pdf

Technical (new to the space):
- cryptoeconomics.study
- Vitalik’s blog posts
- Mechanism Labs blog, GitHub
- Blockchain at Berkeley blog and educational content

Looking to get into research:
- Consensus: https://github.com/Mechanism-Labs/MetaAnalysis-of-Alternative-Consensus-Protocols/blob/master/MetaAnalysis.pdf, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.03936.pdf
- Privacy/ Security: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.00916.pdf
- Smart Contracts: https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/192.pdf
- IC3!

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Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.

Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global, is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg and is produced by Brett Bolkowy.