CS 591 Bitcoin, Blockchains, and Beyond Spring 2019

Instructor

• Jared Saia
• Office: FEC 3120, phone: 277-5446 The best way to reach me is via Piazza (see below). I will check it once a day around 1pm.
• Office Hours: 3:15-4:30 Tuesdays and Thursdays, or by appointment.
• Note: I will always be available in my office during office hours. At other times, if my door is open, feel free to drop in. If the door is closed, I'm probably hard at work on a paper, grant or research problem. Please come by another time or make an appointment via email.

Class Info

Piazza

• I've set up a Piazza forum for discussions and emails in this class. I'll be making all class announcements through there Also, for quick response, please send all of your questions to Piazza (you can post both public, private and anonymous questions).
  Directions for joining the Piazza forum for this class.

Text Book

• Link to Pre-publication Draft..

Lectures

• Cryptographic Foundations
• Digital Signatures using Discrete Logs and Random Oracles
• Decentralization and Byzantine Consensus
• Byzantine Agreement in the Classical Model
• "FrankenAlgorithm"-style proof that BA is impossible with n=3 and 1 Byzantine node
• Section 1.3 of ``Analysis of the Blockchain Protocol in Asynchronous Networks" has a good formal definition of a Blockchain
• Mechanics
• Storing and Using
• Mining

Presentations

Papers for Presentation (Google Doc)

Final Project

• A major deliverable for this class is the final project.
• You're encouraged to do these in a group, but the group should be no more than 3 people
• Project proposals need to be approved by me (1/3 way through the semester), and there will also be a checkpoint (2/3 way through the semester)
• The final project should be of a conference-quality research paper on a theoretical or empirical problem of general interest in cryptocurrencies

Homeworks

• HW 1
• HW 2
• HW 3

Syllabus

Interesting and Useful Links