Lehrinhalte
Blockchain technology enables mistrusting entities to cooperate in the absence of a trusted third party. The technology also forms the basis of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum. A main challenge faced by current blockchains however regards their scalability: the usual example in the literature is that while custodian payment systems can easily support thousands of transactions per second, blockchains currently merely support tens of transactions per second.
By allowing users to make payments directly, without global consensus protocols and withing having to commit transactions on the blockchain, emerging off-chain networks, also known as payment channel networks or second-layer blockchain networks, can greatly improve the scalability of cryptocurrency payment systems. Indeed, over the last years, off-chain networks such as Bitcoin Lightning, Ethereum Raiden, and XRP Ripple, to just name a few, have received great interest.
The goal of this seminar is to get an understanding of the state-of-the-art technology behind blockchain and cryptocurrency networks. To this end, we will critically discuss recent scientific publications in this area, review open-source implementations, and study whether existing methodologies and evaluations can be reproduced. The seminar hence will consist of discussions, presentations and hands-on and research components.
The seminar revolve around fundamental problems and design principles. A tentative outline of the main topics to be covered in the course are
* Topology and routing of payment channel networks
* Security and privacy aspects of payment channel networks
* Available data and methodologies on payment channel networks
* Decentralization and scalability
