Lecture 2, 26th August: Bitcoin and Nakamoto Consensus
Presenter: Kartik Nayak
Reference reading: Bitcoin, Hash functions, Blog post
Notes
Lecture 4, 2nd September: Byzantine General’s Problem, Dolev-Strong Protocol
Presenter: Kartik Nayak
Reference reading: Consensus definition, Paper, Blog post
Notes
Lecture 5, 7th September: Dolev-Strong Protocol (contd.), Communication complexity of Byzantine Broadcast
Presenter: Kartik Nayak
Reference reading: Dolev-Reischuk paper, Blog post
Notes
Lecture 6, 9th September: Latency of Byzantine Broadcast, Need for a PKI
Presenter: Kartik Nayak
Reference reading: Latency-paper, Latency-Blog post, FLM-paper, FLM-Blog post
Lecture 8, 16th September: Setup assumptions, differences between synchrony, partial synchrony and asynchrony
Presenter: Kartik Nayak
Reference reading: setup assumptions, network model, partial synchrony, DLS paper, FLP paper
Lecture 11, 28th September: Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance, HotStuff
Presenter: Kartik Nayak
Reference reading: PBFT-paper, video, blog-post on variants, HotStuff-paper
Notes
Lecture 12, 30th September: Scalability of Decentralized Trust
Presenter: Ittai Abraham
Video
Lecture 13, 7th October: Dfinity’s Synchronous Consensus Protocol
Presenters: Jannis Stoeter, Adam Carriker
Reference reading: Original paper, exploration paper
Slides
Lecture 14, 12th October: Dfinity’s Internet Consensus Computer Protocol, Sync HotStuff
Presenters: Shuhan Chen, Shan Qing, Yu Tang
Reference reading: ICC, Sync HotStuff, SHS blog post, Survey of modern synchronous protocols
Sync HotStuff slides, ICC slides
Lecture 16, 19th October: Selfish mining, Fruitchains
Presenters: Zoe Kona, Mariusz-Derezinski Choo
Reference reading: Selfish mining [paper, blog post], Fruitchains
Selfish mining slides
Lecture 17, 21st October: Prism: Improving Nakamoto consensus
Presenter: Rathi Kashi
Reference reading: Prism
Lecture 19, 28th October: Accountability
Presenter: Kartik Nayak
Reference reading: BFT Protocol Forensics
Slides
Lecture 20, 2nd November: Proof-of-stake, SnowWhite
Presenters: David Pujol, Sarisht Wadhwa
Reference reading: SnowWhite
Slides
Lecture 21, 4th November: Ethereum 2.0
Presenter: Silas Lenihan, Sarisht Wadhwa
Reference reading: Gasper, Eth beacon chain
Eth beacon chain slides, Gasper slides
Lecture 22, 9th November: Ouroboros Samasika, Use of trusted hardware
Presenters: David Chanel Richardson, Diego Espinosa
Reference reading: Samasika, A2M
Samasika slides
Lecture 23, 11th November:
Presenter: Dahlia Malkhi
Lecture 24, 16th November: Ebb-and-Flow Protocols, Random beacons and coin tossing
Presenters: Pranay Jain, Adithya Bhat
Reference reading: Ebb-and-Flow, Drand
Slides – randomness beacons and coin tossing
Lecture 25, 18th November: Project Presentations
Lecture 26, 23rd November: Project Presentations
Tentative list of topics: link