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Lecture

Blockchain Fundamentals

Description

This lecture covers the financial applications of blockchains and distributed ledgers, exploring topics such as the definition of blockchain, its history, proof of work, Ethereum, decentralized finance, smart contracts, tokens, and programming smart contracts. It delves into the assessment methods, including coding assignments, group essays, and group presentations. The lecture also discusses the necessity to abandon central authority in the monetary system, the challenges of double spending in distributed networks, and the properties of digital signatures and cryptographic hash functions. Additionally, it explains the origins of blockchain technology, the Bitcoin consensus algorithm, the decision path for using a blockchain, and the crucial aspects of security, decentralization, and scalability in blockchain technology.

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Ontological neighbourhood

Computer engineering

Computer security: Blockchain

Theoretical computer science

Programming language theory: High-level programming languages

Related concepts (32)

Decentralized autonomous organization

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), sometimes called a decentralized autonomous corporation (DAC), is an organization managed in whole or in part by decentralized computer program, with voting and finances handled through a blockchain. In general terms, DAOs are member-owned communities without centralized leadership. The precise legal status of this type of business organization is unclear. A well-known example, intended for venture capital funding, was The DAO, which amassed 3.

Cryptocurrency

A cryptocurrency, crypto-currency, or crypto is a digital currency designed to work as a medium of exchange through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it. It is a decentralized system for verifying that the parties to a transaction have the money they claim to have, eliminating the need for traditional intermediaries, such as banks, when funds are being transferred between two entities.

Blockchain

A blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of records (blocks) that are securely linked together via cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data (generally represented as a Merkle tree, where data nodes are represented by leaves). Since each block contains information about the previous block, they effectively form a chain (compare linked list data structure), with each additional block linking to the ones before it.

Distributed ledger

A distributed ledger (also called a shared ledger or distributed ledger technology or DLT) is the consensus of replicated, shared, and synchronized digital data that is geographically spread (distributed) across many sites, countries, or institutions. In contrast to a centralized database, a distributed ledger does not require a central administrator, and consequently does not have a single (central) point-of-failure.

Blockchain analysis

Blockchain analysis is the process of inspecting, identifying, clustering, modeling and visually representing data on a cryptographic distributed-ledger known as a blockchain. The goal of blockchain analysis is to discover useful information about different actors transacting in cryptocurrency. Analysis of public blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum is typically conducted by private companies like Chainalysis, TRM Labs, Elliptic, Nansen, CipherTrace, Elementus, Dune Analytics, CryptoQuant.

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