Mircea Popescu's Socratic Bitcoin Blazes

Acknowledgement

The remaining files of this repository were published by
Mircea Popescu, on his personal site, in response to the
perceived lack of unspecialized professionals among the
humans crowding for money and attention around Bitcoin.

I'm not going to copy his entire preamble, yet, for it
can still be found on generic archival sites:

https://archive.md/4oK5x

I hope that I will never run one myself!

Communications

Section C. Computer Science, Engineering and Systems Design, applied.
C.1 Explain the solution Satoshi Nakamoto found to the Byzantine Generals problem.
C.2 Discuss the advantage of distributed data storage over alternative solutions,
  as well as the broad history of deployments.
C.3 Introduce and discuss the concept of stability.
C.4 Discuss the characteristics of the C++ language that make it
  an uniquely inappropriate choice for the implementation of Bitcoin.
  Make proposals for an alternate choice, with justification.
C.5 Give an example in which chained encryption results
  in a scheme weaker than the weakest link.
C.6 Explain the second-system effect, with application to a well known case.

Economics

Section B. Economics, applied.
B.1 Illustrate the roles and fuctions of a bank,
  and discuss its historical evolution.
B.2 Provide a brief history of remittance in human civilisation.
B.3 Explain, with reference to economic theory
  and to the history of economic thought, why the medium-of-exchange
  function of money and the store-of-value function of money are orthogonal.
B.4 Explain the functions and functioning of centrally-issued currency.
  Propose criteria to score the performance of the centrally-issued currency manager.
B.5 Illustrate with examples created for the purpose the dangers
  which beset economic systems built on programatically-issued money.
  

Mathematics

Section A. Mathematics, applied.
A.1 What is a trapdoor function ? What is an acyclic graph ?
A.2 Explain the Byzantine Generals problem.
A.3 Create your own symmetric enchiphering scheme,
  so that obtaining the plaintext out of cyphertext
  takes at least twice as many operations if one doesn't have the key.
A.4 Discuss perfect forward secrecy,
  in the broader context of mathematical guarantees.
A.5 What is meant by "Proof of Work" ?
A.6 What is a stable solution ? Define Nash's equilibrium.
A.7 Describe at least two orthogonal notions of 'entropy',
  and discuss their applications.

Operations

Section D. Sociopsychology and Operational Security, applied.
D.1 What purpose does asymmetric cryptography serve ?
D.2 Explain the disadvantages of "brainwallets".
D.3 Explain what "airgap" means, and then illustrate
  through discussing an example created for the purpose.
D.4 What is "social engineering" and why is it difficult
  to defend against in an institutional setting ?
D.5 Define consensus, with references.
D.6 Discuss the practical differences between anonimity
  and pseudonimity. What is a Sybil attack ?
D.7 Explain why Rawls' approach to ethics is pseudoscientific.

Questions originally published by Mircea Popescu on the Trilema blog.

I have renamed the files to semantically meaningful words, numbered the separate questions, and not modified the text beyond addition of newlines and spaces to fit within narrow columns.

I realize that this directly violates Mircea's instructions about how to quote text when forwarding emails, may his last laugh echo forever.