Subject to Change

This page is a preview of different topics and possible weeks to cover them. I might move stuff around or add/drop topics!

Dec 11-17: Final Exams

Week 14: Dec 2 (coming off of Thanksgiving recess)

Week 13: Nov 19-25: Blockchain applications

Week 13: (Nov 19-25)

Constant Function Market Maker (Trustless, permissionless, exchange technique)
Bitcoin Script Virtual Machine Description: https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook/blob/develop/ch07_authorization-authentication.adoc
Bitcoin (actually Nexa) instruction set (opcode) Reference. Yes, actually READ through these! (so you get a sense of what can and can’t be done)
Ethereum is a dark forest (Ethereum development story)

Week 12: Nov 12-18: Scripting topics

Constant Function Market Maker (Trustless, permissionless, exchange technique)
Bitcoin Script Virtual Machine Description: https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook/blob/develop/ch07_authorization-authentication.adoc
Bitcoin (actually Nexa) instruction set (opcode) Reference. Yes, actually READ through these! (so you get a sense of what can and can’t be done)
Ethereum is a dark forest (Ethereum development story)

Week 11: Nov 5 - 11: No class (Veteran’s day) CryptoZombies Week 2

Week 10: Oct 29 - Nov 4: No class (Election Day) CryptoZombies Week 1

Week 9: Oct 22-28 Ethereum-family Scripting, Bitcoin-family Scripting, Tokens

Tools

Ethereum online IDE: https://remix.ethereum.org
Bitcoin Scripting online: https://siminchen.github.io/bitcoinIDE/build/editor.html
Nexa script debugger: https://debug.nexa.org/

Reference material

Ethereum Tokens
- Contract-implemented and enforced tokens (similar to what you did in cryptozombies). Follow the link into the EIPs to see the Solidity interface.
- ERC-20 Token Standard
- ERC-721 Non-fungible Tokens
Bitcoin Tokens (Ordinals and Inscriptions)
- https://docs.ordinals.com/overview.html and/or https://github.com/ordinals/ord/blob/master/bip.mediawiki Skim to understand that one can assign each Satoshi an order by mining – this is the Nth satoshi mined, and that that number can be carried forward through transactions to assign a number to every satoshi in the UTXO set.
Native Blockchain Tokens (Group Tokenization Proposal)
- Miner validated tokens on bitcoin-like blockchains. Skip the intro, read “Functional Description”, up to “Contract Encumbered Groups”. Read the use cases to understand general token use cases for any token technology on any blockchain.

Week 5: Sept 24-30 Bitcoin Networking, Eclipse Attacks, and Distributed Clock Synchronization

Networking and Eclipse Attack Video Lecture
Single transaction block analysis
Clock Synchronization

We are going to use short excerpts from “Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms” by Andrew S. Tanenbaum and Maarten Van Steen. Fortunately, the entire text is available for free! Just give any email address to the author’s web site and they’ll send you a PDF.

Please read:

Section 6.1: Clock Synchronization (no need to read the Berkeley algorithm or about wireless networks)
Section 6.2: Logical clocks

Later in the semester, we’ll use the text for another topic.

Reference

Eclipse Attacks on Bitcoin’s Peer-to-Peer Network

Purely optional reading for the course, but if you are interested, here is the original Lamport paper:

Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system, by Leslie Lamport, Communications of the ACM; 21(7): 558–565. (1978)

Week 4: (Sept 17-23) Elliptic Curve Crypto

Reference

(Optional) elliptic-curve-cryptography-a-gentle-introduction
(Optional) ECC part 2
(Optional) Chapter 8, Paar and Pelzl
(Optional) Chapter 9, Paar and Pelzl

661 only
Review this paper Attacks against Autofinalization and Parking.
Understand:

That a variety of “tweaks” can be invented to modify Satoshi’s algorithm to choose the “main chain”
What two proposed tweaks: “autofinalization” and “parking” actually do
There seems to be no description of this consensus change, except for the source code located in this function (reading just the comments may be helpful).

Week 3: (Sep 9 - 16) Selfish Mining, Sybil Attack

Please skim the papers, watch the videos, and then read the papers carefully.

Reference

Week 2: (Sep 3-9) Cryptography Overview, Doublespend Attacks

We continue our investigation into basic blockchain architecture.

Overview of Applied Cryptography Video Lecture
Doublespend Attack Video Lecture (1/2)
Doublespend Attack (2/2) – note the final equation in this video has some typos although the derivation is correct in essence. Use the equation in Satoshi’s white paper to calculate the likelihood of matching the main chain. And to calculate the probability of exceeding the main chain:

$\lambda = \frac{zq}{p}$
$1- \sum_{k=0}^{z+1} (\frac{\lambda^ke^{-\lambda}}{k!})(1-(q/p)^{z+1-k}), if q < p$