Blockchains - Protocols and Techniques for Distributed Trust
People
Cachin C.
Course director
Description
This course introduces the technology and protocols behind blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and distributed ledgers, ranging from traditional Byzantine-fault-tolerant consensus in consortium blockchains to censorship-resistant consensus in permissionless cryptocurrencies.
Topics
- Consensus, traditional consensus protocols
- Symmetric cryptography, hash functions, hash chains, and Merkle trees
- Nakamoto consensus
- Bitcoin, UTXO model, scripts
- Ethereum, smart contracts
- Atomic swaps
- Byzantine-resilient (BFT) consensus
- Hyperledger Fabric
- Tokens, ERC-20, and ICOs
- Proof-of-stake consensus
- Governance, meta-consensus, hard forks, and protocol-level consensus
- Public-key cryptography, discrete logarithms, Diffie-Hellman, ElGamal encryption, Pedersen commitments
- Zero-knowledge proofs, statements using discrete logarithms, proofs for equality, range proofs
- Confidential transactions
REFERENCES
- Christian Cachin, Rachid Guerraoui, Luís E. T. Rodrigues: Introduction to Reliable and Secure Distributed Programming (2. ed.). Springer 2011, ISBN 978-3-642-15259-7, pp. I-XIX, 1-367 https://www.distributedprogramming.net/
- Arvind Narayanan, Joseph Bonneau, Edward W. Felten, Andrew Miller, Steven Goldfeder: Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies - A Comprehensive Introduction. Princeton University Press 2016, ISBN 978-0-691-17169-2, pp. I-XXVII, 1-304 http://bitcoinbook.cs.princeton.edu/
Education
- Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence, Elective course, Lecture, 1st year
- Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence, Elective course, Lecture, 2nd year
- Master of Science in Financial Technology and Computing, Core course, Lecture, 2nd year