Understanding Decentralised Systems
Three books are planned, linked by the theme “Understanding Decentralised Systems”.
The first one should appear in early 2026 and will probably be subtitled “Foundations and Blockchain”. It is being written by Bill Roscoe and will be published by Springer. The extracts available here are drafts of a few chapters of this book, as yet without illustrations or exercises. The Prefaces of both volumes 1 and 2 are also included, which give a lot more detail about these books.
The second book is likely to be subtitled “Digital Civilisation” and will cover the principles that should apply to running the world via a decentralised web-based collection of applications. It will develop a rigorous high-level model of trusted computing, which is capable of implementing many variants on Confidential Computing”. We will describe many applications of this under the general heading of Digital Civilisation, as well as showing how it interacts with blockchain. We expect it to appear early in 2027. It is being written by Bill Roscoe and Pedro Antonino and will be published by Springer.
Provisionally, the authors of the third volume, subtitled “Programming and Verification” will be the same and it will be on programming and verifying decentralised systems, and will include some new approaches we have developed for building dependable systems tolerant of malevolent participants, and much material on smart contracts and other approaches to having decentralised systems run programs. We will discuss approaches to verifying decentralised systems and the smart contracts that run on them. For those used to Bill’s books being about CSP, this third book will contains a fair amount, including a CSP model of a blockchain. All three books will be structured as texts with exercises and other supporting material.
These videos were recorded in November 2024 and the project has developed significantly since then.