cs291d-20fall's Introduction

CS291D-20Fall: Blockchains and Cryptocurrencies

Lecturer

Foundations of Distributed Consensus and Blockchains (FDCB)
Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies (BCT, You can find a free version of the earlier draft if you don't want to buy the book)

Note: this is a tentatvie schedule

Date	Speaker	Topic	Readings	Event
Oct 1		No lecture
Oct 6	Chu	Introduction, Cryptographic Primititives	FDCB Chapter 2	Homework 1 Out
Oct 8	Chu	Bitcoin Primer	Bitcoin White Paper, BCT Chapter 2-3
Oct 13	Chu	Consensus I: Byzantine General Problems, Dolev-Strong	FDCB Chapter 3	Homework 1 Due
Oct 15	Chu	Consensus II: Nakomoto Consensus and the Longest Chain Protocol	FDCB Chapter 6,14
Oct 20	Derek Leung (MIT/Algorand)	Consensus III: Speed Up Consensus using Randomness	Algorand Agreement, Algorand System	Project Team Formation
Oct 22	Chu	Ethereum, EVM and Smart Contract	Ethereum Yellow Paper
Oct 27	Chu	Writing Smart Contracts using Solidity	Solidity Doc
Oct 29	Chu	Intro to Zero Knoledge Proofs	Lecture by Silvio Micali	Project Proposal Due, Homework 2 Out
Nov 3	Fan Zhang (Duke/Chainlink)	Connecting blockchains with real world using oracles
Nov 5	Chu	zkSNARK Primer		Homework 2 Due
Nov 10	Chu	zkSNARK Internal I
Nov 12	Chu	zkSNARK Internal II
Nov 17	Chu	zkSNARK Internal III		Project Progress report due
Nov 19	Chu	zkSnark Application: zcash	zerocash
Nov 24	Jiaping Wang (MSR)	Consensus IV: Speed Up Consensus using Sharding	Monoxide
Nov 26		No lecture (Thanksgiving)
Dec 1	Chu	zkStark: removing trusted setup
Dec 3	Victor Ji (Harvard)	Token Economy and Regulation
Dec 8	Chu	Extra Office Hour for Project Hacking
Dec 10		Project Presentation
Dec 12				11PM PST, Report Due

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