Welcome to the RAM Crypto School 2023, a specialized program conducted in collaboration with the Raising A Mathematician (RAM) Foundation. Join gifted high school students from across India to explore the world of blockchains and consensus, with a generous splash of cryptoeconomics!

Course Materials:

1. Tim Roughgarden’s Foundations of Blockchains (TR)
2. Elaine Shi’s Foundations of Distributed Consensus and Blockchains (ES)
3. Decentralized Thoughts

Coursework:

• Week 0: Pre-reading
  • The Only Crypto Story You Need, by Matt Levine
• Week 1 (Aug 3): A peek into consensus and cryptoeconomics (through transaction fee mechanism design)
  • TR lecture 1.1-1.4 (An introduction to blockchains and the state machine replication (SMR) problem)
  • TR lecture 11.1-11.7 (Why transaction fee mechanisms?)
• Week 2 (Aug 13): Byzantine Broadcast and the Dolev-Strong, An Introduction to Mechanism Design
  • TR lecture 2.1-2.5 (Baby steps to solving the SMR- Byzantine Broadcast and the Dolev Strong)
  • Lecture 2 and lecture 3 from Tim Roughgarden’s CS364A (Incentivizing users to be truthful and Myerson’s lemma)
• Week 3 (Aug 20): The Big Impossibility for Transaction Fee Mechanisms
  • Chung and Shi 2023, Foundations of Transaction Fee Mechanism Design, Sections 1-4 (A dream transaction fee mechanism that is user incentive compatible, miner incentive compatible, and collusion proof does not exist)
• Week 4 (Sep 3): Lots of Consensus!
  • TR lecture 3.1-3.3 (The PSL-FLM impossibility and the importance of PKI)
  • TR lecture 4.1-4.6, 5.1-5.3 (The asynchronous model and the FLP impossibility)
• Week 5 (Sep 10): The Partially Synchronous Model
  • TR lecture 6.1-6.3 (An introduction to the partially synchronous model)
  • The Tendermint Protocol
  • Optional- TR lecture 7.1-7.5 (The Tendermint protocol)
• Week 6 (Sep 17): Revenue Optimal Auctions, Welfare Optimization in General Environments
  • A quick introduction to integration by parts
  • Lecture 5 from Tim Roughgarden’s CS364A (Revenue optimal auctions)
  • Lecture 7 from Tim Roughgarden’s CS364A (The VCG mechanism- welfare optimization in general environments)
• Week 7 (Sep 24): Credible Revenue Optimal Auctions with Cryptography
  • Ferreira and Weinberg 2020, Credible, Truthful, and Two-Round (Optimal) Auctions via Cryptographic Commitments (Using cryptography to sidestep the Akbarpour-Li trilemma showing the non-existence of truthful, credible, bounded-time, revenue optimal auctions)
• Week 8 (Oct 8): Longest Chain Consensus
  • TR lecture 8.1 – 8.8 (An analysis of the longest chain consensus protocol)
• Week 9 (Oct 15): Permissionless Consensus and Proof-of-Work
  • TR lecture 9.1 – 9.7 (Moving from permissioned to permissionless consensus by coupling longest chain consensus with proof-of-work)
• Week 10 (Oct 22): Selfish Mining in Proof-of-Stake Longest-Chain consensus
  • TR lecture 10.1 – 10.7 (Introducing incentives as an object of interest, selfish mining)
• Week 11 (Oct 29): Introduction to Proof-of-Stake
  • TR lecture 12.1 – 12.6 (Introducing proof-of-stake, inherent challenges in designing a proof-of-stake protocol)
• Week 12 (Nov 5): More on Proof-of-Stake
  • TR lecture 12.7 – 12.13 (Sourcing randomness for proof-of-stake leader elections)
• Week 13 (Nov 12): Even More Proof-of-Stake
  • TR lecture 12.14 – 12.19 (Combining proof-of-stake with BFT and longest chain)
• Week 14 (Nov 19): Further More on Proof-of-Stake
  • TR lecture 12.20 – 12.24 (Long range attacks, proof-of-stake vs proof-of-work)
• Week 15 (Nov 26): Selfish Mining on Proof-of-Stake Protocols
  • Ferreira, Hahn, Weinberg, and Yu 2022 Optimal Strategic Mining against Cryptographic Self-Selection in Proof-of-Stake (A selfish mining attack on proof-of-stake protocols like Algorand that uses cryptographic self-selection).