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What is a blockchain and how does it work? Distributed consensus.
Discussion topics : What is blockchain? Discuss origins, core concepts of distributed consensus, and compare/contrast traditional ways of accounting or recording information with the blockchain. Decentralized vs. centralized.
Bitcoin Paper
"Minimum Viable Blockchain" by Ilya Grigorik
Cryptographic basics: Hash functions and Public Key Cryptography. What is a hash function? Why is the blockchain "secure"? Public keys as identities.
Ch. 1 and 2 from Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies by Arvind Narayanan
Smart Contracts and Decentralized Applications.
Introduce concepts of smart contracts. Public vs. private blockchains. Applications to Ethereum and developing in Solidity.
"On Public and Private Blockchains" by Vitalik Buterin
"A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform""
Ethereum: A secure decentralised generalised transaction ledger"
Solidity documentation
Architectural weaknesses of current protocols. Proof of stake and zero-knowledge proofs/protocols.
Scaling, energy utilisation, 51% attacks, growing length of blockchains, incentive misalignments (e.g. in Ripple), hard forks. Problems with Proof-of-work; Alternative mechanisms such as Proof-of-Stake; The ability of zero-knowledge proofs to ensure security and privacy (examples: Zcash and Ethereum).
"On scaling decentralized blockchains"
"Segregated Witness Benefits"
"The Bitcoin Lightning Network: Scalable Off-Chain Instant Payments"
"zkSnarks in a nutshell" by Christian Reitwiessner
Proof of Stake
Introducing Casper "the Friendly Ghost"
Implications: Secure distributed storage and compute.
Use of blockchains and distributed trust to safely store massive amounts of information in peer-peer networks (examples: FileCoin). The IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) hypermedia distribution protocol (addressed by content and identities); bittorrent swarms.
"On Decentralizing Prediction Markets and Order Books"
Interplanetary Filesystem whitepaper
Implications: Healthcare and MedRec/MedChain.
Talk and questions with special guest. How can blockchain help create a more secure and efficient system to store and transfer medical records/research data? Current limitations on medical records.
"A Case Study for Blockchain in Healthcare:"MedRec" prototype for electronic health records and medical research data." by Ekblaw et al.
"Healthcare rallies for blockchains"
Implications: Micropayments and the unbanked.
Micropayment applications to the Energy sector. Current limitations of transaction fees. Segwit/Lightning as a potential two-layer approach to micropayments on top of Bitcoin.
"Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World" by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott
"How Segwit and Lightning Will Enable Low-Fee Bitcoin Micropayments"
Implications: Sharing personal data for discovery.
Privacy and third-party access to personal data.
"Decentralizing Privacy: Using Blockchain to Protect Personal Data" by Sandy Pentland and Guy Zyskind
Implications: Intelligent currencies.
Cryptocurrencies and the dynamics of the crypto market as a whole. What's next?
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