SI 486I Spring 2022 / Notes

This is the archived website of SI 486I from the Spring 2022 semester. Feel free to browse around; you may also find more recent offerings at my teaching page.

Unit 9: Etheruum network and smart contracts

1 Summary and Goals

The Ethereum blockchain is currently the second-most popular (in terms of total market value), after Bitcoin. Being created a few years later, the Ethereum developers tried to correct many of the problems with Bitcoin, as well as to allow many new kinds of blockchain applications with the development of smart contracts.

2 Reading

  1. Section 10.7 of Narayanan et al, which starts on page 285 of this pdf.
  2. Ethereum whitepaper, especially the sections on Ethereum itself (pp 13-19) and Applications (pp 19-25).