Blockchain at Columbia will facilitate a free non-credit course titled Blockchains and Cryptocurrencies. The lectures will be held once a week and taught by B@C officers, guest speakers, and Columbia faculty members. The curriculum of the course will provide an overview of cryptography, consensus mechanisms, Bitcoin mining and attacks, simplified payment verification, wallet security, hard/soft forks, smart contracts, decentralized applications, token economics, "fat-layer" protocols, zero-knowledge proofs, privacy chains, side-chains, regulatory concerns, and impact on environment/society (depending on the progression of the course).
Contact : blockchain@columbia.edu
Location : Barnard Hall Room 409
All lecturers will be held in Barnard Hall Rm. 409 unless otherwise indicated. We will update this page and send a notice to the mailing list if there is a change in room.
Date and Time : Thursdays from 6:00 - 7:00 pm
The lecturers will be held weekly on Thursday with the exception of Thanksgiving Break (11/22).
There are no prerequisites for this course. However, having taken COMS W3137 Data Structures and Algorithms or an equivalent will be helpful in understanding some of the data structures described in the course.
The Fall 2018 enrollment for this course will be available to anyone in the community. There is no registration requirement. Join the Mailing List to receive course updates.
| Lecture | Date | Topic | Speaker | Readings | Slides |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 10/11/18 | Intro to Blockchains & Cryptocurrencies Syllabus, Distributed Ledger Technology, Structure of a Blockchain, Wallets |
Martin & Julian | N/A | Lecture 1 |
| 2 | 10/18/18 | Bitcoin Network Intro to Mining, SPV Nodes, Types of Attacks |
Martin & Julian | Bitcoin Whitepaper, Majority is Not Enough | Lecture 2 |
| 3 | 10/25/18 | Byzantine Fault Tolerance Byzantine General's Problem, Byzantine Agreement |
Nir Kabessa | Byzantine General's Problem, Byzantine Fault Tolerance | Lecture 3 |
| 4 | 11/01/18 | Consensus Protocols Proof of stake, proof of work, and alternatives |
Vernon & Nir | Peercoin Paper (POS), EOS - An Introduction, DPoS - Missing Whitepaper | Lecture 4 |
| 5 | 11/08/18 | Smart Contracts Ethereum, Smart Contracts, dApps |
Omid Malekan | Ethereum White Paper | Lecture 5 |
| 6 | 11/15/18 | zk-Snarks Zcash and zk-SNARKS |
Dr. Eran Tromer | ZCash White Paper | |
| 7 | 11/29/18 | Applications Health Care and Entertainment Applications |
Dr. Tej Anand | TBA |
The readings for this course are expected to be completed before coming to class. You can find the accompanying readings in the syllabus above or in the readings folder.
We want the course to run as smoothly as possible. If you have any suggestions, we would love to hear back from you. Please speak to us before or after class or email us at blockchain@columbia.edu.