Genesis, growth and Future of Blockchains via trilemmas

Speaker: Chandrasekaran Pandu Rangan

Abstract

Informally, a trilemma is a situation where you want three things , all the time and all together, but you can not have more than two of them at any time!.  And so you compromise bit and manage to get as much as you can... When we started this in the context of a decentralised computation, Blockchain technology is born. It continued to thrive on other solutions and innovations on dealing with other trilemmas. From genesis to growth to research trends, trilemmas are guiding force behind every innovation in the blockchain technology. I attempt to present the foundation aspects of these trilemmas in a light weight fashion. By the way, some dilemma are easy to resolve:  should you choose between honouring an invitation call from your bf/gf/soulmate or to attend this talk.... However, Trilemmas are tricky!!!!

Bio

Prof. Chandrasekaran Pandu Rangan obtained his Master’s degree in Mathematics from the University of Madras, Chennai and Doctorate degree from the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. He joined the faculty of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras in 1982. He served as a distinguished Visiting Professor at the Information and Communications University, Deajon, South Korea. He joined the rank of Professors in 1995 and served as Head of Department from 1998–2001. He was a member of the founding team for IIT Hyderabad (IITH) and served as Inaugural Chair to set up the computer science department at IITH (2008–2011). He has upgraded the unit of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in Chennai to a Centre and served as Inaugural Chair for the ISI, Chennai Centre. He is a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) from 2006. He was honoured as Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman Chair Professor in 2017. He served at IITM until his retirement and superannuated in 2021. Since August 2021, he is serving at IISc, in the Department of Computer Science and Automation as Sathish Dhawan Visiting Chair Professor.
Pandu Rangan also served in the Board of Directors of the International Association of Cryptology Research (IACR), USA and in the Board of Directors of the Society for Electronic Transactions and Security (SETS), Chennai. He was also on the editorial board of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series published by Springer Verlag, Germany. He has developed special outreach programme-related lecture series and customised competency building lecture series at TCS, INFOSYS, IBM Research, Tokyo, Japan, SAMSUNG R&D, Seoul, South Korea.