Haseeb-Qureshi / multi_hop_locks.md

Created February 3, 2019 17:47

Privacy-preserving Multi-hop Locks for Blockchain Scalability and Interoperability (SBC19)

Privacy-preserving Multi-hop Locks for Blockchain Scalability and Interoperability

Speaker: Pedro Monero-Sanchez

Payment channels are a widely pursued layer 2 scaling solution
- But they only solve for bidirectional payments (between the two parties who open the channel)
What if we build a payment channel network?
- Naive solution—every pair of parties (N^2) opens a channel with each other
  - But then we need to lock up an exorbitant amount of capital in all these channels
- Instead, let's open a few channels for each party

And rely on other intermediary channels to reach the intended receiver

Haseeb-Qureshi / thunder_mainnet.md

Created February 3, 2019 06:58

New and Simple Consensus Algorithms for ThunderCore’s MainNet (SBC19)

New and Simple Consensus Algorithms for ThunderCore’s MainNet

Speaker: Elaine Shi

Synchronous, with a change of partition tolerance
State machine replication (e.g., blockchain consensus)
- Requires safety (nothing bad ever happens), and liveness (eventually something good happens)
Thunderella
- If you don't know Thunderella, go look it up (check out the BPASE '18 talk)
Wait, there's a flaw in Thunderella?!

A confirmed transaction can be undone, even in a somewhat benign setting

Haseeb-Qureshi / urkel.md

Created February 3, 2019 06:18

# Urkel Trees: An optimized and cryptographically provable key-value store for decentralized naming (SBC19)

Urkel Trees: An optimized and cryptographically provable key-value store for decentralized naming

Boyma Fahnbulleh (Handshake)

Merkle Trees are great, but can we do better?
Ethereum's Wish List on better Merkle Trees:
- Wanted a key-value store for the state
- Allow updates without having to reconstruct the entire tree
- Has bounded depth
- History independent: root hash doesn't depend on ordering among updates (i.e., commutative updates)

Merkle Patricia Tree is basically a fancy radix hash tree

Haseeb-Qureshi / quisquis.md

Created February 3, 2019 05:41

Quisquis: A New Design for Anonymous Cryptocurrencies (SBC19)

Quisquis: A New Design for Anonymous Cryptocurrencies

Speaker: Prastudy Fauzi

Bitcoin and Anonymity
- "Bitcoin is like Twitter for your bank account" — Ian Miers
Current Anonymous Cryptocurrencies and Their Limitations
- Dash, Monero, Zcash
- What technologies do they use?
- Tumblers (Dash), Ring signatures (Monero), SNARKs (Zcash)

Questions you should ask yourself:

Haseeb-Qureshi / mimblewimble.md

Created February 3, 2019 02:26

Building Mimblewimble/Grin, an implementation for privacy and scalability (SBC19)

Building Mimblewimble/Grin, an implementation for privacy and scalability

Speaker: Quentin Le Sceller

MimbleWimble
- Proposed anonymously in IRC by Tom Elvis Jedusor
- Private by default
- Massively prunable
- Relies solely on elliptic curve cryptography
- No scripting
MW transactions consist of:

Haseeb-Qureshi / formally_verifying_dapps.md

Created October 11, 2018 22:57

Formally Verifying Dapps from the Ground Up @ CESC

Formally Verifying Dapps from the Ground up

Martin Lundfall, MKR

K Framework

Allows you to define a programming language by specifying a:
- Syntax
  - via BNF notation
- Configuration
  - state according to your VM, things like stack, memory, storage, etc.

Rewrite rules

Haseeb-Qureshi / application_specific_blockchains.md

Created October 11, 2018 22:26

The Case for Application-Specific Blockchains @ CESC

The Case for Application-Specific Blockchains

Loi Luu, Kyber Network

Why Loi Luu is a badass

Designed Elastico, first peer-reviewed sharding protocol for public blockchain
- Inspired Zilliqa
Created Oyente, first open-source smart contract verifier
- Used by Melonport, Quantstamp, Augur
Co-founder at Kyber Network

On-chain liquidity protocol for token swaps

Haseeb-Qureshi / gap_game.md

Created October 11, 2018 21:24

The Gap Game @ CESC

The Gap Game

Itay Tsabary, Technion

Headline result: miners in PoW are incentivized to shut off their hardware occasionally.

Proof of Work

Find a value for which a protocol-defined condition holds
- In Bitcoin, hash(block) < K
Memory-less process
PoW is very expensive

Haseeb-Qureshi / arbitrum.md

Created October 11, 2018 19:17

Arbitrum: Scalable private smart contracts @ CESC

Arbitrum: Scalable, Private Smart Contracts

Ed Felten

Ethereum smart contracts

Have issues with scalability:
- Every miner needs to emulate every execution step for the VM
- Thus, charges gas for those who want to advance state of VMs
  - To compensate miners
- The complexity of contracts is capped by the global gas limit

All contract code and data can only be public

Haseeb-Qureshi / chainlink.md

Created October 11, 2018 18:48

Secure Decentralized Oracles and Reliably Triggering Smart Contracts @ CESC

Secure Decentralized Oracles and Reliably Triggering Smart Contracts

Sergey Nazarov

The Smart Contract Connectivity Problem

Smart contracts can't connect with external data, so off-chain resources are not easily usable.
80%+ of smart contract use cases need external resources.

Blockchain Middleware Creates Connectivity

Can connect smart contracts to critical external data
Can also connect to widely accepted bank payments

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