NS-FUTURE Joint Seminar by Albert Levi
"Bitcoin: What is it? Why it exists? How it survives?"
Bitcoin is a digital currency that works without a trusted third party. In that manner, it is a decentralized system and is not under control of any entity and governmental agency. People may exchange bitcoins among themselves inpeer-to-peer manner in an anonymous way. As of November 2016, total emission is approximately 16 million bitcoins, which corresponds to more than 11 billion USD market value. The consistency of the transactions in bitcoin system is guaranteed via a public ledger, called the Blockchain. In the implementation of bitcoin transactions, several cryptographic primitives are used. Although the use of cryptography provides the base of security and privacy, persistence of the system also depends on the computational power of the miners, who are the contributors to the Blockchain. In this talk, other than the details of the technical building blocks of the bitcoin system, the motivation behind its idea, its philosophy, the level of privacy and economical impact will be discussed.
