This is the archived Spring 2015 version of the course. For the most recent version, see http://bitcoin-class.org.

PointCoin Updates

Posted: Mon 23 February 2015

Reminder: We'll have a quiz in class Wednesday. It will be similar to the previous quiz, and focus on fundamental understanding on how bitcoin works covering material from the beginning of the class through Class 10.

Mining: You'll notice in the PointCoin blockchain that I'm now running an "unfair advantage" node, using a Medium instance on EC2. This is at the insistance of the PointCoin Pizza purveyor, who is worried that it may be too easy for a single miner to obtain a high fraction of the processing power just by managing their EC2 micro instance credits carefully while everyone else's miner is throttled. (You can see this in the blockchain when a new miner starts up, it will often win several blocks in a row, just because it has not yet hit the micro instance throttling level.) (I may decide to turn off my "unfair advantage" miner at some later time, but for now I intend to leave it running to make it a difficult for a single miner to obtain control of a large fraction of the hashing power.)

Talk Tuesday!: There's an interesting security-related talk from Eric Wustrow tomorrow: Anticensorship in the Network, 10:45am in Rice 242.

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