How Bitcoin Works Under the Hood, CuriousInventor, YouTube, January
31, 2017 (A transcript of the video is
available here.)
This 22:24 minute video provides a technical introduction to bitcoin, the
world's first cryptocurrency. It defines bitcoin transfers and explains
how bitcoin ownership is certified, how transfers occur using a
decentralized public blockchain, and the role of miners who collect
transfers, solve a hard computational problem to obtain a proof of work,
and form a block and append it to the blockchain. It also explains the
verification process that each miner does to verify the ownership of
bitcoin and the work of other miners, thereby realizing a system of trust
without invoking a trusted centralized broker.
What is Blockchain?, Centre for International Governance Innovation, YouTube, January 4, 2018
This 6:26 minute video provides a quick overview of the operation of
blockchains and their importance.
Bitcoin Hasn't Replaced Cash, but Investors Don't Care
by Nathaniel Popper, December 6, 2017
This article states that Bitcoin can handle about 5 transactions per
second whereas Visa is able to handle about 25,000 transactions per second.
Blockchain phase 2: Will it scale? by Lucas Mearian,
Computerworld, August 15, 2018
As blockchain grows in popularity, so does the conundrum of how to
scale it while maintaining or boosting performance so it can compete
with today's transaction networks.
The Curious Case of 184 Billion Bitcoin by Bruno, January 14, 2018
The author explains how a failure to check for integer overflow in the Bitcoin software
allowed two units of about 184 million bitcoin to be created and sent to
accounts in 2010 until corrected.
Blockchains from a Distributed Computing Perspective by Maurice
Herlihy, Brown University, January 16, 2018
"This article is a tutorial on the basic notions and mechanisms
underlying blockchains, colored by the perspective that much of the
blockchain world is a disguised, sometimes distorted, mirror-image
of the distributed computing world." Maurice also explains how a failure
to understand this lead to the theft of about $50 Million from the
Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) in 2016 by exploiting poorly
designed "smart contracts."
This Yale Technology Could Fix Blockchain's Security Issues and Make It
a Lot More Viable, Office of Cooperative Research, Yale University,
2018
A team at Yale has developed technology to simplify verification of the
correctness of smart contracts. When smart contracts are embedded in
blockchains, they are permanent. If they contain errors, misuse of
blockchain data can occur. The only way to fix this is to execute a hard
fork, which requires rebuilding the blockchain from the point of the error.
Databases for Blockchains
Concerto: A High Concurrency Key-Value Store with
Integrity by Arvind Arasu, Ken Eguro, Raghav Kaushik, Donald Kossmann,
Pingfan Meng, Vineet Pandey, and Ravi Ramamurthy, Procs.
2017 ACM International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), Pages 251-266
Corda, a distributed ledger technology.
Corda is an open source blockchain project designed for business from the
start. Only Corda allows you to build interoperable blockchain networks
that transact in strict privacy. Corda's smart contract technology allows
businesses to transact directly, with value.
Quorum by J. P. Morgan
Quorum™ is an enterprise-ready distributed ledger and smart contract platform.
Five myths about bitcoin by Joseph Bonneau and Steven Goldfeder, The Washington Post, December 15, 2017
Bitcoin's Academic Pedigree by Arvind Narayanan, Jeremy Clark,
Communications of the ACM, Vol. 60 No. 12, Pages 36-45, December 2017
Algorand: Scaling Byzantine Agreements for Cryptocurrencies by
Yossi Gilad, Rotem Hemo, Silvio Micali, Georgios Vlachos, and Nickolai
Zeldovich, SOSP 2017
Algorand provides a new way to create distributed ledgers that avoids
important problems that arise with traditional blockchains.
A 39:46 minute video
of a talk given at Berkeley by Silvio Micali
explains the basic concepts is available here.
A longer and more complete 1:12:46 video produced by the ACM is available here.
Making Bitcoin Legal by Ross Anderson, Ilia Shumailov and Mansoor
Ahmed, Cambridge University Computer Laboratory, 2018
The authors identify existing law that can be applied to making bitcoin legal.
Iceland Takes Hard Look at Tech Boom Sparked by Its Cheap, Bountiful
Power
by Zeke Turner, The Wall Street Journal, April 19, 2018
By 2030, data centers and all internet-related activity, from streaming video
to analyzing financial data to storing software, photos and
emails, could use more electricity than all of China did in 2018.
