Luca Nizzardo | Cryptography Researcher at IMDEA Software

Bitcoin and Beyond(?), a Cryptographic point of view

Bitcoin’s revolutionary way to achieve consensus provided a first solution to the open problem of obtaining a decentralized digital currency. During the last 8 years, a lot of research effort has been devoted to the design of protocols which could profit by Bitcoin’s underlying distributed ledger to extend its functionalities. This talk will give an overview of Bitcoin’s cryptographic building blocks and their combination to ensure consensus over the blockchain. We will go through current Bitcoin strengths and limitations considering some cryptographic open problems and some proposed solutions.