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Lecture 10: Anonymity on Blockchain (Coinjoin continued from the previous lecture) Each participant writes an input transaction (input address, change address) on say Pastebin. Over Tor, each participant writes an output address. These two entries and not linkable to each […]
Lecture 9: Wallet & Anonymity Wallet A user has a lot of bitcoin address, each of which is H(p_k) or H(script). A wallet manages p_k/s_k, post/verify transactions, and show balances. A wallet can be Cloud wallets like Coinbase or desktop […]
Lecture 8 – Alternative consensus Puzzle solutions are probabilistic proof of work. A typical puzzle utilization function can be modeled as P(challenge, randomness – nonce, difficulty, …) -> true/false P(c, r, d) for Bitcoin is SHA256^2(c, r, d) <= 2^256-d […]
Lecture 7: Community, Economics, and Politics David Chaum – digital cash in 1981 Satoshi Nakamoto – Oct 2008, bitcoin.org was registered in Aug 2008 Genesis block was mined in Jan 2009 First BTC payment – Feb 2010 First online exchange […]
Lecture 6: Bitcoin Miner interactions and Game Theory Game Theory: P x S -> R x P P: Players S: Strategies R: Rewards Examples For the prisoner’s dilemma, tit-for-tat with some positive randomization is the best strategy. Trench soldiers in […]
Lecture 5: Bitcoin mining How to mine Bitcoin Download and run Bitcoin-core to run full Bitcoin node Listen for a new transaction, assemble a pre-block Solve the puzzle (~270 attempts) Broadcast the block Profit The network runs on port 8333. Non-responding […]
Lecture 4: Blockchains 80 bytes block consists of 32 bytes previous block hash, 32 bytes transactions Merkle tree hash, timestamp, bits, nonce, etc. Each block is <= 1MB to minimize the propagation times. Therefore, large transactions require more service fee […]
Lecture 3: Bitcoin overview There are three Bitcoin protocols Consensus Protocol – decides what the ledger is Transaction Protocol – assigns meaning to the ledger Network Protocol – the P2P protocol which decides what new should be added to the […]
Lecture 2: Creating a digital currency Desirable properties of a good digital ledger No deletion Temporal ordering Global consensus Semantic correctness Live – writable, no DOS, no censorship Attempts to create a digital currency in the increasing order of sophistication. […]
Lecture 1: Introduction Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency with distributed trust. The blockchain is a public append-only ledger. The append-only property is sufficient for having a currency. Hash functions: H: M -> T where |M| >> |T| that is space of […]