EE 374: Fundamentals of Blockchain Infrastructure

Course Description

The vision of blockchains is to allow billions of people to interact with minimal trust of third parties. Since the invention of Bitcoin by Nakamoto in 2008, much innovative infrastructure has been built to fulfill this vision. This course is a rigorous treatment of the fundamental concepts behind these innovations. A particular focus is on the problem of distributed consensus and how to make it permissionless, secure and scalable.

The course is divided into 3 parts:

1) Bitcoin as a payment system and as a consensus protocol. Security analysis. Dynamic availability.

2) Proof-of stake protocols. BFT consensus. Accountability.

3) Scaling blockchains. Data availability. Zero-knowledge and optimistic rollups. Security sharing and restaking.

Prerequisites: Basic probability background (CS 109 or EE 178). No blockchains, consensus protocols or cryptography background assumed.

References

• A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography

• Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies