Cryptocurrency Engineering and Design

Calendar

SES #	TOPICS	Key Dates
1	Signatures, Hashing, Hash Chains, e-cash, and Motivation
2	Proof of Work (PoW) and Mining
3	Signatures	Pset 1 due: Hash-based Signature Schemes
4	Transactions and the UTXO Model
5	Synchronization Process, Pruning
6	Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) and Wallet Types
7	OP_RETURN and Catena Guest Lecturer: Alin Tomescu (PhD student in security and applied cryptography)	Pset 2 due: Mine Your Name
8	Forks
9	Peer-to-peer Networks Guest Lecturer: Sharon Goldberg (associate professor in computer science at Boston University focusing on network security)
10	PoW Recap, Other Fork Types
11	Fees
12	Transaction Malleability and Segregated Witness
13	Payment Channels and Lightning Network	Pset 3 due: UTXOhunt
14	Lightning Network and Cross-chain Swaps
15	Discreet Log Contracts
16	Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees (MAST), Taproot, Graftroot
17	Anonymity, Coinjoin and Signature Aggregation
18	Confidential Transactions
19	Ethereum and Smart Contracts Guest Lecturer: Joseph Bonneau (assistant professor at NYU’s Courant Institute researching security, applied cryptography, security economics, and human factors)
20	More about Ethereum
21	Proof of Work at Industrial Scales Guest Lecturer: David Vorick (Co-founder and CEO of Nebulous / Sia & Obelisk)
22	Alternative Consensus Mechanisms
23	New Directions in Crypto
24	zkLedger