Haseeb-Qureshi

# JSON Resume

[JSON Resume] is an easy way to produce an adaptible and professional-looking resume. We recommend that you use it. It'll save you a lot of headaches about formatting, file types, and the like. Plus, it'll make you look like you know how to Internet.

This is what the underlying format looks like:
```
{
  "basics": {
    "name": "John Doe",
    "label": "Programmer",

Haseeb-Qureshi

require 'faraday'

class PasswordCracker
  ALPHABET = (('a'..'z').to_a + ('0'..'9').to_a).shuffle
  SUBJECT = 'password'

  def initialize(api)
    @api = api
    @password = ''
  end

Haseeb-Qureshi

Your task:

• Build a secure coinflip betting game between two players on Ethereum.

ONLY READ THIS DOCUMENT IF YOU WANT TO SPOIL BUILDING THE GAME. FIRST TRY TO BUILD IT YOURSELF, THEN SEE IF IT SURVIVES THE FOLLOWING ATTACKS.

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Haseeb-Qureshi

Cryptoeconomics Mental Model

Vitalik Buterin, Joseph Poon, Karl Floersch

What's new?

• Karl: A lot of recent progress in Plasma Cash.

• Vitalik: Ethereum core has basically had most of the hard problems essentially solved. Only a few details that need to be hammered out—more efficient Merkleization, how to rotate validator sets, etc.

• Joseph: how to coordinate inter-chain communication? How to coordinate faucets, airdrops, to enable different kinds of social coordination.

Haseeb-Qureshi

Spacemesh

Tal Moran

What goes into a cryptocurrency?

• Distributed consensus
  • Everyone agrees on the current state
  • State evolves according to agreed rules
• Incentive mechanisms

• Running a cryptocurrency protocol has costs (CPU, storage, network)

Haseeb-Qureshi

Algorand 2.0

Silvio Micali

Blockchains have an open secret

• There's a lot of aspiration, but the technology is far behind.

The alleged "blockchain trilemma"

• Supposedly, you can only get 2 out of 3: security, scalability, and decentralization.
• Not acceptable, and not true.

Haseeb-Qureshi

Transparent Succinct Arguments

Alessandro Chiesa (UC Berkeley, Starkware, Zcash)

What are succinct arguments?

• Proofs of computational integrity
• Game between prover and verifier
• Prover knows an input to a F(x) that would make it return y
• Prover could trivially prove this by providing x
  • This convinces the verifier for sure!
• Being able to convince the verifier of a true claim is the property of completeness

Haseeb-Qureshi

Fast Multiparty Threshold ECDSA with Fast Trustless Setup

Steven Goldfeder

Digital signatures authorize transactions in cryptocurrencies

• Alice's device, containing her private key, is a single point of failure

Multiparty authentication

• Instead of having a single device store your key material...
  • You can split it into multiple devices

• Designed your address as protected by multiple keys

Haseeb-Qureshi

Scaling Blockchains at the Network and Consensus Layers

Emin Gun Sirer

The Promise

• Blockchain is becoming a big deal.
• Every finance company is developing a "blockchain strategy."
• $5B invested in startups, $10B invested in ICOs.
• Big gap between what's been sold to users, and what current technology is capable of.
• Doesn't scale to being a payment system.
• What about a store of value?

Haseeb-Qureshi

Analyzing China's Influence on Bitcoin

Ben Kaiser, Princeton

Why did we pursue this research?

• There's been a lot of discussion and fear about China's involvement with Bitcoin. We wanted to provide more rigor to the discussion.
• Note: will refer to "China" often—primarily referring to a small number of policymaking groups in China who have the power to affect Bitcoin policy.

Why care about China as a threat?

• China challenges Bitcoin's fundamental security

• Assumption: no party can amass too much power over the consensus process.