Tuesday/Thursday 9:30am - 10:50am
TEP 1403 + Zoom
Course Description
In this course, we will learn the mathematical foundations for blockchains. The course will have three main modules which form the scientific foundations for blockchains:
Cryptography: including computational security, encryption, message authentication, digital signatures, zero-knowledge proofs, multi-party computation, Oblivious RAM, and their applications in blockchains
Distributed consensus: including Byzantine broadcast, state machine replication, Bitcoin’s Nakamoto consensus, lower bounds, and incentive compatibility in large-scale consensus
Incentives and mechanism design: including second-price auction, VCG auction, transaction fee mechanism design, game-theoretically secure protocols for blockchains, Miner Extractable Value, DeFi
Students are required to write mathematical proofs for homeworks and exams. We require the students to have mathematical maturity.
Prerequisites:
CS students: 15251 or 15210 or 15330
ECE students: (18334) or (18335) or (18465) or (18733) or (18202 and 18213) or (18202 and 15513) or (18202 and 18613) or (18202 and 14513)
We will have 1 programming lab, 5 homeworks, 3 mid-terms, and no final.
Useful Links
We use Gradescope to distribute the homework. If you're not registered on Gradescope, please specify your AndrewID and contact Hao Chung (haochung@andrew.cmu.edu) to get the access.Attendance Options
We encourage in-person attendance. However, in case you are sick, we do offer a couple more options for you option for you:- You can attend the lecture synchronously via Zoom.
- You can also watch the recorded lecture videos asynchronously on Panopto. The Zoom and Panopto links will be posted on Piazza.