#History of Mobile Process Calculi

by Joshy Orndorff

In 1992 Robin Milner et al introduced the pi calculus, a member of the mobile process calculus family, as a new and novel model of computation [paper]. The pi calculus has several properties that make it an attractive option for modern programming. It is Turing complete, allows for straight-forward compositional programming, and is fundamentally concurrent. With the appropriate structure on it's channels, it allows for programming with in object capability paradigm.

#History of Blockchain

In 2009 Bitcoin introduced the proof of work blockchain allowing mutually distrusting parties to coordinate permissionlessly through a currency. In 2013 Ethereum generalized that idea to coordinate on arbitrary computations through a system of smart contracts. Both systems have been successful but have struggled to scale.

Progress has been made toward scaling Bitcoin-like UTXO systems through concurrent consensus algorithms [spectre, cbc casper, hashgraph, casanova]. However even these algorithms will not scale Ethereum as it's computational model is inherently sequential and totally-ordered.

Recently, several blockchain projects are beginning to explore smart contracting solutions based on mobile process calculi [RChain, Ambients] rather than traditional sequential models like Ethereum. Such projects will be able to take advantage of concurrent consensus.