Truebit’s founder, Jason Teutsch has received the ACM CCS Test-of-Time Award for his 2015 paper, “Demystifying Incentives in the Consensus Computer” coauthored with Loi Luu, Raghav Kulkarni, and Prateek Saxena. This award recognizes research that has had a lasting impact on computer and communications security.
As the first academic work about Ethereum, this work challenged Satoshi Nakamoto’s gospel assumption that all nodes in a network are honest, instead arguing that nodes are rational and may lack the incentive to verify blocks they didn’t create. This phenomenon is colloquially known as the “verifier’s dilemma.”
This work laid the groundwork for the verification game method for blockchains, subsequently introduced by Teutsch and Reitwießner, which today underlies all optimistic roll-ups. The paper reviews initially included a “strong reject,” however, a Bitcoin fork in July 2015, demonstrating the practicality of the verification issues addressed in the paper, swayed the reviewers to accept the work.
Teutsch’s work with Truebit applies this verification technology to real-world applications such as machine learning, supply chains, and real-world assets. The award recognizes the enduring influence of his research on the field of blockchain and decentralized systems.
Listen to Jason’s acceptance speech here.
