tag: subject/distributed-system

Personal notes on the Generalized Isolation Level Definitions paper that was published in 2000.

Personal notes on the CockroachDB paper that was presented in SIGMOD 2020.

Notes Bittorrent Bittorrent is already a decentralized file sharing platform. How does bittorrent work? When a client receives a .torrent file, it uses the DHT embedded inside the .torrent file to contact the nearest node in the swarm. Once its connected, files can be transferred in a peer to peer way. Problem with Bittorrent There is no incentive for anyone to keep sharing files. IPFS We can store the map of file hash to the file contents in the blockchain using smart contract....

Notes Byzantine protocols can be used to increase the throughput of the blockchain but byzantine protocols work only with a closed membership model. Need to define an open membership model for BFT protocols.

Notes After Bitcoin, other coins started popping up- Litecoin(using its hashing algo) only allowed mining using GPUs or CPUs. Monero(using its hashing algo) only allowed mining using CPUs. Ethereum also introduced something called smart contracts. What problems might come up in smart contracts? If the code is non-deterministic then it’ll be a problem. Data of the code must be isolated so each smart contract is run in classes and objects. Infinite loops