DARPA, the US defense agency to host Blockchain Workshop

The famed US defense agency DARPA(Defense Advanced Projects Agency) will be hosting a two-day workshop on Blockchain in the coming months. As of now, the tentatively scheduled dates are February 14 and 15, 2019, in Arlington, VA.

As per the official RFI(Request For Information) published, the DARPA is mainly interested in permissionless blockchain as it can enhance the security platform to a greater extent.  Further, the RFI explains that a permissionless system is the one which any individual may join in the computation.

Primarily, the RFI emphasis on the role of blockchain technology in data security and storage and quoted that,

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

Three main topics under DARPA RFI

Apart from that, the article essentially discusses on three main aspects. Each of which holds as a topic for a session in the aforementioned workshop.

Firstly, to create large-scale permissionless distributed consensus protocol by incentivizing the participants but not necessarily in the form of money. As an example, the bitcoin tradition of rewarding the miners with a portion of minted currency. The topic explained that participants can be incentivized in other forms such as access to computing resources.

Secondly, the economic-driven security models for distributed computation protocols, asking for information about “methods that leverage rigorous economic notions to advance theories of security for distributed, permissionless computation protocols.”

Finally, the third topic talks about ‘Centralities of Distributed Consensus Protocols‘. Responses for this category are “novel analyses, methods to analyze and/or address the centralization of a distributed consensus protocol,” but also “unintended centralities and/or associated mitigations.”

Well, this certainly is a sign where irrespective of ‘cryptocurrency as a huge success or not but blockchain sure is’. 

What do you think this workshop by DARPA? Let us know in the comment below.