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1) Introduction and course overview (1 lecture)
2) Bitcoin (5 lectures)
Bitcoin: the first and most important blockchain.
Bitcoin as a payment system.
Bitcoin as a permissionless consensus protocol.
Proof-of-work.
Longest chain protocol.
Liveness and safety.
Throughput and latency.
Dynamic availability.
3) Proof-of-stake protocols (5 lectures)
Byzantine Fault Tolerant protocols.
Tendermint.
Deterministic vs. probabilistic finality.
Fast vs slow confirmation.
Accountability, slashing and long-range attacks.
Ethereum Proof-of-stake.
Availability-finality and availability-accountability dilemmas and their resolution via ebb-and-flow protocols.
Finality gadgets.
4) Blockchain scaling (7 lectures)
Scaling of transaction throughput under communication, storage and computing limits.
The data availability problem.
Efficient data availability via coding and verifiable information dispersal.
Light clients.
Zero-knowledge and optimistic layer 2 rollups.
Security sharing and staking.
Bridges.
Scaling Bitcoin.
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