CS590.01: Blockchains, Cryptocurrencies, and Smart Contracts (2022 Fall)

Updated on: Mar 30, 2022

Many of you asked for more information about CS590.01 so I’m sharing this flyer.

Pre-reqs

A significant part of homework and lab is about Solidity programming – we will provide learning materials for Solidity but prior programming experiences with Solidity or other languages certainly will help.
You will need to write, e.g., Python scripts to run simulations.
Working knowledge of discrete math and probability is recommended (e.g., to understand Bitcoin mining, we will use facts like “what is the distribution of the min of two exponential random variables?”).

Tentative syllabus

Course Intro
Bitcoin Overview
Bitcoin Overview II
Basic Crypto I
Basic Crypto II
UTXOs
Classic Consensus
Nakamoto Consensus
Advanced Scripts
Bitcoin Blocks and Mining
Payment channels I
Payment channels II
Smart Contract Intro
Smart Contract Bugs
Key Management
Oracles
Decentralized Exchanges (DEXes)
DeFi (Finance)
Selected topics (TBD Maybe: privacy-preserving techniques)
Selected topics (TBD Maybe: stateless smart contracts

Workload

Attendance required (and graded)
4 homework, 50% problem solving (on paper), and 50% programming (in Solity & Python)
Lab: A CTF competition based on https://www.damnvulnerabledefi.xyz/ and https://github.com/pdaian/hackthiscontract
Midterm & Final exams (Format TBD; I’m thinking a take-home final)

Note

I’ve taught a seminar course last year on related topics (https://crypto-n-crypto.netlify.app/), but note that the 2022 Fall version will be very different in terms of the scope and depth.