ECE 598 PV

Subject offerings of new and developing areas of knowledge in electrical and computer engineering intended to augment the existing curriculum. See Class Schedule or departmental course information for topics and prerequisites. Course Information: May be repeated in the same or separate terms if topics vary.

Principles and Design of Blockchain. This course is an introduction to blockchains, with a concrete application focus on payment systems. Bitcoin is the original distributed payment system and significant research and engineering have transpired in the decade since its birth. This course studies all the layers of a modern distributed payment system, borrowing from recent research literature. In particular, the network stack, the consensus layer, storage and computation layers and privacy and anonymity stacks are viewed holistically. The course studies fundamental tradeoffs to concrete metrics of performance: throughput, latency, security, storage, compute, privacy and how the different designs proposed in recent literature compare. Both analytical (theoretical security guarantees) comparisons and implementation-based empirical performances will be explored in the course. Prerequisites: Probability (ECE 313), programming in Python/C++, algorithms (CS 473) and networking (ECE/CS 438).