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
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This course is not offered in the academic year 2019/20
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
