6.829 Fall 2020 Paper Questions

For each paper, by 12AM the evening before lecture:

In Chord, the information required at each node for correct routing is distinct from what’s required for good performance. What information is needed for correctness, and what is needed for good performance?

  • Lec 19: Networking for Blockchain
In Bitcoin, the difficulty of the proof of work puzzle is adjusted over time such that on average one block is mined every 10 minutes, limiting throughput to about 3 transactions per second (with 1MB blocks). Why is the time between blocks set so large? Suppose we tried to scale throughput by reducing the inter-block time to, say, 1 second. What might go wrong?
6.829 home