Fan Long: The Problem with PoS, Conflux and the Chinese Crypto Environment

My guest today is Fan Long, co-founder of Conflux, founder and president of Tree-Graph Blockchain Research Institute and currently an Assistant Professor at University of Toronto. Conflux is a next generation blockchain protocol with a focus on scalability, security and extensibility. Fan holds a Ph.D in Computer Science from MIT. His research interests included systems security, programming language, and blockchain. He was awarded the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Dissertation Award and MIT Best Dissertation Award for his work in Automatic patch generation, which is focused on creating software that promises to automatically correct software defects without the need for developers. He was also a competitive programmer, winning two gold medals in the International Olympiad of Informatics (2005, 2006). Our conversation covers the origins of bitcoin and blockchain with an emphasis on comparing bitcoin and blockchain to previous distributed system networks and how they attempted to solve the Byzantine Generals Problem, we also compare and contrast the differences between the proof-of-work (PoW) and proof-of-stake (PoS), the current crypto environment in China and what it’s like running a Crypto Company in China and his work at Conflux, and which country fears Bitcoin becomes the world reserve currency the most. ––– Coingaming was formed when one Australian professional poker player, who knew first-hand the importance of fun, fast and fair gaming, met two Estonian tech whizzes who just so happened to be vanguards of Bitcoin. From there, Coingaming’s ecosystem of brands and products evolved, breathing new life into the gaming industry. Now with 400+ people, Coingaming is behind some of the world’s most innovative crypto gaming brands and is on a mission to further awareness of cryptocurrencies across the globe. ––– Permission Permission.io enables people to earn rewards for doing the same things online they do every day by empowering them to take back ownership of their personal data from Silicon Valley startups. People can