Project Proposals
Project Proposals are due Thursday, 19 March (11:59pm). Send
your proposal by email to evans@virginia.edu with
subject line Project Proposal. Your email should contain at least:
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Title of your Proposal - a short title that should get across what you are doing.
-
Team members list - a list of everyone on your team. You should
cc: all the team members in the email so I have one email to reply-all
to that will reach your full tem.
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Motivation - explanation of why your project topic is worthwhile.
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Project Plan - what you plan to do.
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First deliverable - description of what you will have ready to submit
for the first deadline, Sunday, 5 April (note that you will be
presenting about your project in class on Wednesday, 1 April).
If you are looking for teammates for your project, or searching for a
project idea, come to my office hours after class today if possible.
Note: due to a bug in
slideshare's updated player, ink markings no longer appear in the
viewer.
If you
download the slides, they are present though.
Hopefully, the player will be fixed someday.
Alternate Cryptocurrencies
How can decentralized cryptocurrencies be different from bitcoin?
Variations:
- Economics: deflationary vs. inflationary
- Proof-of-work: possible advantages of other proof-of-work mechanisms
- Consensus mechanism: majority of computing power vs. alternatives
- Scripting language for transactions: simpler vs. more powerful and expressive
- Parameters: speed of blocks, size of transactions
Dogecoin!
What is a key derivation function?
Why is SHA-256 is horrible key derivation function today?
Colin Percival, Stronger Key Derivation via Sequential
Memory-Hard Functions, 2009. presentation slides including XKCD 538.
What is a memory-hard algorithm?
Is a memory-hard algorithm better for a cryptocurrency proof-of-work
than a compute-intensive one like SHA-256?
Andrew Miller, Ari Juels, Elaine Shi, Bryan Parno, and Jonathan
Katz. Permacoin: Repurposing Bitcoin Work for Data
Preservation. IEEE Security and Privacy
("Oakland") 2014.
Interesting Video
If you're still looking for ideas for your project still, this video may give you some good ideas:
What Satoshi Didn't Know, Gavin Anderson, DevCore Boston 2015. (This talk gets into the history of bitcoin and lots of issues with flaws in its design, and raises some interesting possibilities for future work - e.g., are there ways to use old unspent transactions to solve network problems without spending them?)