CS 251 - Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies - Stanford Fall 2020 - Lecture 1
I decided to go through the public materials on this course.
The textbook is the Arvind Narayanan text.. which I'd read the preprint of way back in 2015. Decided to skip reading the text and try to dive in to lectures and projects.
- if trusted party exists => no need for blockchain -> totally agree here.. this is probably the fatal real flaw of most of crypto right now.. and the source of all of those it's just a slow database comments
- financial systems: often no trusted party -> totally disagree... most modern financial systems spend a ton of effort creating trust between parties.. through complex chains of contracts, counterparties, laws and disclosure. The end product of all of that is a messy kludge admittedly. More accurate to say that there is no natural trusted party in financial systems, and that we are trying to find a workaround the kludge in crypto.
Trust is deeply fundamental to the functioning of payments, incidentally. Credit cards are an almost worldwide trust network with a lot of peer edges with imperfect mutual trust by which one can construct surprisingly rich sets of good-enough-for-a-transaction trusted pathways.
— Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) June 15, 2021
Anyway, Boneh splits the layers into
And the defines 4 properties for the consensus layer
And then a further 2 in the compute layer
