Dr. Leemon Baird is the inventor of Hashgraph and the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Swirlds Inc. He has a PhD in Computer Science and is also a successful entrepreneur and former professor.
Hashgraph is a new data structure and consensus algorithm.
**PLEASE NOTE: This interview was conducted prior to the Hedera Public Ledger announcement.**
In this episode, Leemon and I discuss:
– What a Hashgraph is. How does it compare to a Blockchain?
– Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) – Leemon does a brilliant job of explaining this
– Exciting use cases for Hashgraph. Hint: they already have a few big ones in the pipeline
SHOW NOTES
[00:58] – Who is Leemon Baird and what is Hashgraph? Introduction and overview
[11:46] – Is Blockchain dead?
[12:37] – Hashgraph, Blockchain, and DAG (directed acyclic graph) – the differences
[16:13] – Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) vs. Proof-of-Work (PoW)
[20:11] – The Byzantine General’s Problem
[25:56] – Why did Swirlds decide to patent Hashgraph?
[27:55] – Asynchronous BFT vs. Synchronous BFT
[29:38] – Hashgraph use cases – Credit Union Ledger (CU Ledger)
[32:44] – Just how fast is Hashgraph?
[35:36] – Sharding
[38:25] – Leemon discusses “fairness” on the Hashgraph platform
[41:17] – Smart contracts on the Hashgraph platform
[44:05] – What challenges did Leemon Baird face as he was designing Hashgraph?
[46:52] – Hashgraph’s “killer app”
[53:01] – Leemon’s perspective on the future of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Blockchains in general
[55:37] – How to get in touch with the Swirlds team
[56:23] – Conclusion
RESOURCES DISCUSSED
– DAG (directed acyclic graph)
– Professor Emin Gun Sirer’s episode
– Leemon’s talk at Berkeley
– Leemon’s talk at Harvard
– Probabilistic finality (Vitalik’s perspective)
– The Byzantine General’s Problem
– Java
CONTACT INFORMATION
Swirlds and Hashgraph website
