Designing, verifying, correctly implementing and later improving core distributed protocols like consensus, which are critical for safety and reliability of decentralized systems, is notoriously difficult and error-prone. One of the biggest challenges here is dealing with the inherently concurrent nature of decentralized systems. But it’s too important, and we can’t really afford to get it wrong, so we need to take it seriously and do a much better job here. But how?

In order to make a breakthrough in this area, we would benefit from revisiting the fundamentals and trying to rethink distributed and concurrent programming from the first principles. How should we approach concurrency in distributed algorithms in a natural way and with confidence? How can we avoid excessive synchronization, prevent deadlocks and resource leakage? How can we make distributed and concurrent systems more simple, flexible, and reliable? In this talk, I will share with you some insights into the fundamentals of distributed and concurrent programming that could help us to overcome these difficulties and make a breakthrough for the future of decentralized computing!