Lecture 1. Introduction: coordination and Bitcoin.
Lecture 2. Introduction: Ethereum and beyond.
Lecture 3. Cryptographic hash functions.
Lecture 4. Encryption and digital signatures.
Lecture 5. The SMR and BB consensus problems and the Dolev-Strong protocol.
Lecture 6. Relaxing PKI: the hexagon argument.
Lecture 7. Asynchrony, BA consensus and the FLP impossibility.
Lecture 8. Partial synchrony and the CAP theorem.
Lecture 9. The Tendermint Protocol.
Topics for researching and presenting
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(10/20) Vadicherla+Meruva: AMMs (10/25) Satter+Byrnes: DAOs (10/27) Wang+Liu: NFTs (11/1) Dupont: payment channels & lightning network (11/3) Pu+Wong: oracles (11/8) Choi+Xu: money markets (11/10) Lewars+Lin: stablecoins (11/15) Aw+Barua: MEV (11/17) Lee+Jafri: zk privacy (11/22) Freitag+Reino: zk rollups (11/29) Zhang: formal verification in Coq of [RAM→CircuitSAT] reduction for zk-SNARKs (12/1) Tsou+Mishra: optimistic rollups
8/23, Lec 1 | 8/25, Lec 2 |
8/30, Lec 3 | 9/1, Lec 4 |
9/6, Lec 5 | 9/8, Lec 6 |
9/13, Lec 7 | 9/15, Lec 8 |
9/20, Lec 9 | 9/22, Lec 10 |
9/27, Lec 11 | 9/29, Lec 12 |
10/4, Lec 13 | 10/6, Lec 14 |
Fall Break! | 10/13, Lec 15 |
10/18, Lec 16 | 10/20, Lec 17
1 presentation + discussion |
10/25, Lec 18
1 presentation + discussion | 10/27, Lec 19
1 presentation + discussion |
11/1, Lec 20
1 presentation + discussion | 11/3, Lec 21
1 presentation + discussion |
11/8, Lec 22
1 presentation + discussion | 11/10, Lec 23
1 presentation + discussion |
11/15, Lec 24
1 presentation + discussion | 11/17, Lec 25
1 presentations + discussion |
11/22, Lec 26
1 presentation + discussion | Thanksgiving! |
11/29, Lec 27
1 presentations + discussion | 12/1, Lec 28
1 presentation + discussion |
Instructor: Artem Kotelskiy, artofkot@gmail.com
Virtual office hours: reserve a meeting here
Class time/location: TueTh 4:45pm- 6:05pm, in Chemistry 128.
Plan:
- Attending lectures is mandatory, despite the fact that lecture notes will be posted.
- Homeworks are not mandatory, but highly recommended - solutions can be discussed in virtual office hours/appointments.
- Researching and presenting one special topic is mandatory. You will be divided into teams of 2 people, and each team will need to choose a topic to research and present. I will provide initial resources and will help with composing a good presentation. Presentations will be held at the end of the course, one per lecture, with a discussion after the presentation. You will also anonimously assess each others’ presentations.
- Final grade will be based on how thoroughly you research the topic, as well as how well you prepare your presentation. (Ample guidance will be provided for both.)