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Blockchain Scalability and its Foundations in Distributed Systems

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  Course by Vincent Gramoli and University of Sydney
Course Features
  • Lectures
    5
  • Duration
    11 Hours
  • Level
    Beginner
  • Delivery
    Online
  • Audience
    Programmers
  • Provider
    University

This is a very focused course examining blockchain consensus (validating the correctness of blockchain transactions) algorithms and associated scalability, security topics.

The course should be accessible to everyone (having basic college mathematics background) but all the technical topics would be mostly interesting to blockchain designers and developers.

The course is designed for beginners - basic knowledge of mathematics (concepts of graph and set theories) and familiarity with the fundamental computer programming data structures would be helpful.

  • Content

    The course starts with a brief blockchain history and a concise basic concept presentation. The rest of the course examines the evolution of blockchain consensus algorithms, implied security and scalability issues in theoretical settings as well as in real world scenarios.

  • Technology

    The course introduces the foundations of the distributed computing and examines progressively more complex consensus algorithms in detail taking advantage of a graph theory “language” and a computer programming pseudocode.

  • Applications

    All the consensus algorithms discussed during the course will be useful for blockchain designers and developers, system administrators as well as hackers, security experts.

  • Delivery

    The learning material is primarily presented as video lessons and the additional reading texts followed by a quiz testing main concepts presented. The learners have possibility to connect and discuss new concepts, ideas in the online discussion forums. All the lessons have external reference lists that could be used to get deeper insights into the topics. Each learning week ends with an interview with a practitioner that developed one of the most popular blockchains.

Blockchain promises to disrupt industries once it will be efficient at large scale. In this course, you will learn how to make blockchain scale. You will learn about the foundational problem of distributed computing, consensus, that is key to create blocks securely. By illustrating limitations of mainstream blockchains, this course will indicate how to improve the technology in terms of security and efficiency.

In particular, this course will help you:
* understand security vulnerabilities of mainstream blockchains;
* design consensus algorithms that tolerate attacks, and;
* design scalable blockchain systems.

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