Study one of the following and the resources of your own:

  1. Kolb, John, Moustafa AbdelBaky, Randy H. Katz, and David E. Culler. “Core concepts, challenges, and future directions in blockchain: A centralized tutorial.” ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) 53, no. 1 (2020): 1-39.
  2. Pavloff, Ulysse, Yackolley Amoussou-Guenou, and Sara Tucci-Piergiovanni. “Ethereum proof-of-stake under scrutiny.” In Proceedings of the 38th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing, pp. 212-221. 2023.
  3. Rowstron, Antony, and Peter Druschel. “Pastry: Scalable, decentralized object location, and routing for large-scale peer-to-peer systems.” In IFIP/ACM International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms and Open Distributed Processing, pp. 329-350. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2001.

Prepare slides for one of the following topic:

  1. Explain the Pastry DHT
  2. Explain and compare DNS seeds, hard coded addresses, and gossip protocol with which Bitcoin nodes find peers;
  3. Explain Bitcoin’s difficulty adjustment mechanism for mining in the context of the mining algorithm;
  4. Explain Ethereum’s Proof-of-Stake protocol
  5. Explain Merkle proofs used in Bitcoin blockchain
  6. Explain Bitcoin consensus protocol

Be prepared to present selected slides.