Yongge Wang

Abstract: Cryptographic Currency, Blockchains, Bmart Contract, and Distributed Trust
Blockchains have become a buzzword and many blockchain proponents believe that smart contract is a panacea to redefine the digital economy. In this talk, we will focus on the following three aspects of blockchains.
First, we will briefly introduce and discuss the history to crypto-currency. Then we will discuss the community’s misconception that any kind of contracts could be implemented as a blockchain smart contract.
Lastly, we discuss our recent work regarding the potential legal, forensic, and social impact of blockchains on the society. For the misconception of smart contract, we show that many protocols/contracts in our daily life could not be implemented
using Turing- complete smart contracts. As an example, we formulate an Obama-Trump contract and show that this kind of contract could not be implemented using blockchain smart contract techniques.
For the last topic, we show that proof-of-work (or hybrid proof-of-work/proof-of-stake systems) based blockchains may pose serious challenges to both forms of government: dictatorships and constitutional democracies.
Based on our analysis, we think that there is a possibility that most countries will ban proof-of-work (or hybrid proof-of- work/proof-of-stake systems) based blockchains in future.
On the other side, if proof-of-stake based blockchains are appropriately designed, then one could avoid these challenges. If time allows, we will show that many ICO systems could contain serious vulnerabilities that could be attacked (or defeated).

Dr. Yongge Wang is a professor at UNC Charlotte. Dr. Wang has published extensively on research topics including algorithmic information theory, cryptography, and post-quantum security. Dr. Wang has proved several classical results in modern effective randomness research which are included as the fundamental theorems in most Algorithmic Information Theory graduate textbooks. Dr. Wang is the holder of three patents and the inventor of two IEEE 1363 standardized techniques. Dr. Wang is one of the designers for fundamental W3C and IETF XML security techniques such as XMLENC and XMLDSig syntax. These standards are the starting point for all XML related security techniques. Dr. Wang played important roles in developing research and education programs at UNC Charlotte. Recently, Dr. Wang has been working on fully homomorphic encryption, garbled computation techniques, and apply these techniques to achieve privacy preserving computation in cloud. Dr. Wang has designed quantum resistant public key encryption techniques RLCE (http://quantumca.org) and developed the software package readily to be integrated into current Internet infrastructure. Dr. Wang is currently an academic advisor for the Cryptic Labs http://crypticlabs.org that builds a unique community of illustrious cryptography and security advisors, researchers and innovative blockchain entrepreneurs who work on decentralize and distributed trust.

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