Catalog

Cryptocurrency Engineering and Design

Media Arts and Sciences MIT CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 20 lectures

Bitcoin and other cryptographic currencies have gained attention over the years as the systems continue to evolve. This course looks at the design of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and how they function in practice, focusing on cryptography, game theory, and network architecture.

Syllabus

  1. 1 Lecture 1: Signatures, Hashing, Hash Chains, e-cash, and Motivation
  2. 2 Lecture 2: Proof of Work and Mining
  3. 3 Lecture 3: Signatures
  4. 4 Lecture 4: Transactions and the UTXO Model
  5. 5 Lecture 5: Synchronization Process, Pruning
  6. 6 Lecture 6: SPV and Wallet Types
  7. 7 Lecture 7: OP_RETURN and Catena
  8. 8 Lecture 8: Forks
  9. 9 Lecture 10: PoW Recap, Other Fork Types
  10. 10 Lecture 11: Fees
  11. 11 Lecture 12: Transaction Malleability and Segregated Witness
  12. 12 Lecture 13: Payment Channels and Lightning Network
  13. 13 Lecture 14: Lightning Network and Cross-chain Swaps
  14. 14 Lecture 15: Discreet Log Contracts
  15. 15 Lecture 16: MAST, Taproot, Graftroot
  16. 16 Lecture 17: Anonymity, Coinjoin and Signature Aggregation
  17. 17 Lecture 18: Confidential Transactions
  18. 18 Lecture 22: Alternative Consensus Mechanisms
  19. 19 Lecture 23: New Directions in Crypto
  20. 20 Lecture 24: zkLedger

Course materials