Instructors: Mark
Braverman (mbraverm@), Matt Weinberg (smweinberg@).
Ed: https://edstem.org/us/courses/8774/discussion/
Announcements
will be posted below:
-
This course will focus on mechanism design
challenges in cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance.
-
Prior knowledge of cryptocurrencies is not
assumed/required.
-
Assignments in the course will require you to
reason about strategic properties of cryptocurrency/DeFi
protocols, so general comfort with algorithm design and incentives (and
proof-writing) is assumed.
-
Instructors will initially give lectures, and
cover topics such as miner incentives in Bitcoin and related cryptocurrencies.
-
Students will later give presentations. These
will introduce a new topic (examples might include: stablecoins,
blockchain market makers, etc.), and discuss mechanism design challenges. These
presentations may be based off whitepapers, forum/discord threads, and/or
research papers.
-
Precise topics will be filled in the table
below as the semester progresses.
Homework: Homeworks will be posted below when
they become available. Here
is a LaTeX template you may use for the homework, and here
is a short guide to LaTeX.
References: You may find the following
references helpful.
AA: The fall 2021 iteration of
Advanced Algorithms.
EC: The spring 2021 iteration of
Economics and Computation.
The AGT Book: The AGT book. (Click link --> resources -->
Algorithmic Game Theory --> Algorithmic Game Theory).
Bitcoin
Book:
The Bitcoin book.
Lecture Notes:
I will post
the lecture notes I use to present on Ed. These lecture notes are written
hastily and likely contain errors, but may be helpful as a reminder for what was
covered in class, or for the cited references.
|
Date |
Topic |
Supplemental
Material |
|
9/2 |
Intro to Bitcoin |
|
|
9/7 |
Selfish Mining |
|
|
9/9 |
TBD |
TBD |
|
9/14 |
TBD |
TBD |
|
9/16 |
TBD |
TBD |
|
9/21 |
TBD |
TBD |
|
9/23 |
TBD |
TBD |
|
9/28 |
TBD |
TBD |
|
9/30 |
TBD |
TBD |
|
10/5 |
TBD |
TBD |
|
10/7 |
TBD |
TBD |
|
10/12 |
TBD |
TBD |
|
10/14 |
TBD |
TBD |
|
10/19 |
Fall Break |
|
|
10/21 |
Fall Break |
|
|
10/26 |
TBD |
TBD |
|
10/28 |
TBD |
TBD |
|
11/2 |
TBD |
TBD |
|
11/4 |
TBD |
TBD |
|
11/9 |
TBD |
TBD |
|
11/11 |
TBD |
TBD |
|
11/16 |
TBD |
TBD |
|
11/18 |
TBD |
TBD |
|
11/23 |
TBD |
TBD |
|
11/25 |
Thanksgiving Break |
|
|
11/30 |
TBD |
TBD |
|
12/2 |
TBD |
TBD |