An introduction to the technologies behind Bitcoin & other cryptocurrencies, their caveats and open problems for statistical physicists.
by
Nicolas Innocenti
→
Europe/Stockholm
Description
This is a review/discussion talk aiming at seeding ideas for future research topics rather than presenting established scientific results.
We'll start by giving an introduction to Blockchain technology - the "revolution" behind the Bitcoin network and many other related cryptocurrencies. We focus on high level technical aspects and particularly on how an inverse game theory approach allows to combine a set of well-established concepts in a way that gives revolutionary new properties to the resulting system.
We move on to describe problems and limitations of current Blockchain implementations and end by giving a brief introduction to Iota - the first of a new generation of cryptocurrencies that use technologies "beyond blockchain".
Finally, we present early stage ideas about how methods from statistical physics and/or information theory could improve scalability or give new interesting properties to cryptocurrencies.
