Two-Day Blockchain Workshop Planned For February, Hosted By DARPA

Blockchain technology is easily one of the biggest areas of growth in the tech world, offering benefits to multiple industries for their ledger. However, the only way to keep that progress moving along is to continually bring in new developers. To learn more about this technology, a two-day blockchain workshop is scheduled to be hosted by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in February 2019.

DARPA was developed by the U.S. Department of Defense to aid in research. Right now, their goal is to work on technologies through this workshop, which will be held in Arlington, Virginia. The agency released a five-page RFI, which described the areas of “particular interest,” which specifically outlines “‘permissionless’ distributed consensus protocols.” The paper says that these systems are simply protocols “where any individual may join in the computation.”

The report goes on, saying that the field has plenty of research logged. Elaborating, the paper explains that DARPA is looking at “several, less-explored avenues of permissionless distributed consensus protocols.” The Information Innovation Office (I2O) of DARPA released the report, though they submitted a request for details that covers three topics, though each one will be featured at the workshop.

The first topic involves providing incentive to the distributed consensus protocols but abstaining from using something with monetary value. Instead, they will be offering “various aspects of participation in the protocol” as that incentive. They reference the concept of bitcoin mining as an example of the kind of system they speak on. For this reason, this topic highlights the importance of offering the above-described protocols without the promise of payment.

The second topic of discussion in the RFI, according to the official report, is

“Economic-Driven Security Models for Distributed Computation Protocols.” On this subject, the writers of the document request details about the “methods that leverage rigorous economic notions to advance theories of security for distributed, permissionless computation protocols.”

The final topic:

“Centralities of Distributed Consensus Protocols,” is primarily brought up out of concern for cybersecurity. The company states that the applicable responses on this topic include “novel analyses, methods to analyze and/or address the centralization of a distributed consensus protocol.”

Recognizing that blockchain technology offers a certain protection for data and storage, the RFI adds,

“Technologies for distributed consensus protocols have been revolutionized by their prominent role in cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies. These technologies have dramatic implications for the security and resilience of critical data storage and computation tasks, including for the Department of Defense.”

This announcement falls in line with the way that governments around the world are becoming more and more interested in blockchain technology. The German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi), for example, has decided to work on the use of blockchain technology to reduce the risk of tax evasion, based on a report only two days ago.

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