US Deptartment of Defense Research Arm to Host a Permissionless Blockchain Workshop

The U.S. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) will host a two-day blockchain workshop in February next year.

DARPA is the research arm of the U.S. Department of Defense. It is looking to investigate technologies for distributed consensus during a workshop which is tentatively scheduled for February 14 and 15, 2019, in Arlington, VA.

A five-page RFI (Request to Information) released by the agency’s Information Innovation Office (I2O) states, “of particular interest to DARPA are so-called ‘permissionless’ distributed consensus protocols.”

Permissionless systems are described on paper as protocols where any individual may join in the computation.

The report also indicates that while there is a substantial amount of research in this field, the federal agency is interested in various less-explored avenues of permissionless distributed consensus protocols.

I20’s request for information covers three different important topics. Each of which is set to constitute a session at the agency’s workshop. The first is incentivizing distributed consensus protocols without the use of money.

The document explains that permissionless distributed protocols must incentivize aspects of participation in the protocol. It noted Bitcoin (BTC) mining as an example system. The first topic focuses on  making large-scale permissionless distributed consensus protocols without paying participants.

The second subject covered in the RFI is– economic-driven security model for distributed computation protocols, asking for information about methods that leverage rigorous economic notions to advance theories of security for distributed, permissionless computation protocols.

The third and the last topic on which the agency requested information covers the centralities of distributed consensus protocols. Responses for this category are primarily novel analyses, methods to analyze or address the centralization of a distributed consensus protocol but unintended centralities or associated mitigations.