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Lectures Introduction Creating a Digital currency Bitcoin Overview Bitcoin Blockchain Bitcoin Mining Bitcoin Miner interactions and Game Theory Cryptocurrencies: Community, Economics, and Politics Alternative Consensus Wallet & Anonymity Anonymity on Blockchain Altcoins Ethereum Ethereum Ethereum Governance Bitcoin Side-chains (guest talk) […]
Lecture 19: Advanced Topics Topic 1: Smart Property Manage ownership of some property like stocks on the blockchain. Colored coins allow arbitrary properties on Smart Contract. Similar to Namecoin, there cannot be a light node/SPV for this. Another example is […]
Lecture 18: Advanced Topics Three topics are chosen by students (another three for the next lecture) Topic 1: Quantum Computing An electron has two states top and bottom spins, represented as |1> and |0>. An electron is in a superposition […]
Lecture 16: Bitcoin payment channel Visa ~ 10, 000 transactions per second Bitcoin ~ 3 transactions per second => 60 GB of blockchain data per year Waiting for 6 blocks ~ 60 mins is a huge wait for Bitcoin. Therefore, […]
Lecture 15: Bitcoin guest talk (Greg Maxwell & Pieter Wuille – Blockstream) on sidechains Forking does not advance Bitcoin since forks suffer from economic acceptance. UTXO model UTXO model is less intuitive, more private, and smaller persistent storage footprint. UTXO […]
Lecture 13: Ethereum Code: ROM (Read-only memory) calldata: arguments There are two types of instructions: Arithmetic including SHA3 and sys operations like create [contract], call [contract], and delegate call, etc. CALL – called code is executed in the context of […]
Lecture 14: Ethereum Governance When contracts call other contracts, there are four major parameters, g – gas, v – value, in – in size of inputs, out – out size of outputs. The gas must come from the initial transaction, […]
Recap: alt-coins Bitcoin is a replicated state machine, the system moves within S States with I inputs producing O outputs. For Bitcoin, S is the set of UTXOs. For Namecoin, the state consists (name, value). Ethereum’s goal was to implement […]
Lecture 11: Altcoins Three ways to improve Bitcoin Code update – This can update or change the P2P network Soft fork – To introduce a stricter verification for example P2SH Hard fork – transaction improvements and consensus change Altcoin = […]
Lecture 10: Anonymity on Blockchain (Coinjoin continued from the previous lecture) Each participant writes an input transaction (input address, change address) on say Pastebin. Over Tor, each participant writes an output address. These two entries and not linkable to each […]