Prof. Etienne Rivière (Université Catholique de Louvain)
Bitcoin, the blockchain and beyond.
In this lecture we will cover the design and implementation of innovative and trustworthy applications using blockchain technologies. We will first consider the famous bitcoin cryptocurrency and define how it allows massive-scale distributed consensus in the presence of selfish and malicious participants. We will detail how transactions, blocks, and the blockchain are implemented in bitcoin. We will then discuss alternative implementations of these building blocks and of blockchains in general, and how they enable novel decentralized applications and trust models. We will cover applications of smart contracts, efficient consensus protocols, and permissioned blockchains. The lecture requires only basic knowledge about cryptographic primitives such as asymmetric encryption.
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