#217 overall
Foundations of Blockchains
Coursera
2 recommenders · 3 threads · recommended in 3 years, 2022–2026 · score 2.0
A lecture course by Tim Roughgarden on the technical foundations of blockchains, covering distributed consensus, proof of work, proof of stake, selfish mining, and transaction fee mechanism design. It starts with classic permissioned consensus results before moving to blockchain-specific topics.
Commenters call it rigorous and very well explained, and recommend it as the background for understanding blockchain and consensus theory.
Science & Engineeringadvancedfreevideo lectures#blockchain#distributed consensus#proof of work#proof of stake#roughgarden
Recommendations by year
20062026
I highly recommend Tim Roughgarden's lecture series Foundation's of Blockchain. It covers it all:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNJGPI0fuFA&list=PLEGCF-WLh2...
Not OP, but a good resource for distributed consensus specifically is Tim Roughgarden's YouTube playlist "Foundations of Blockchains" [0] (hear me out, despite the title - see below). It's 85 videos over 12 lectures, rigorous, very well explained (but assumes some CS fundamentals). Not original work, but gives the conceptual framework and background so that one can read these classic papers in context.
Per-lecture reading lists are on the course page [1]. He also points at Elaine Shi's Foundations of Distributed Consensus and Blockchains [2] and Andrew Lewis-Pye's Consensus in 50 pages [2] as background, though these are more textbooks, not papers.
Remarkably, the first 7 lectures deal with permissioned systems, recapitulating the classic results of consensus in distributed systems (Dolev Strong, FLP impossibility, CAP) - no blockchain in sight. This takes us to the state of the art at the end of the 1990's (with algorithms that can achieve consensus in the presence of byzantine failures, namely Byzantine Paxos and PBFT, though he discusses a modern variant, permissioned Tendermint from 2014).
Lecture 8 stays permissioned and proves consistency and chain quality for the longest-chain rule. Only at Lecture 9, with proof of work, does anything specifically blockchain appear; then L10 block rewards and selfish mining, L11 transaction fee mechanism design; L12 proof-of-stake sybil resistance with the whole litany of attacks possible there.
Very good series in my view, and shows how little technical merit this whole blockchain circus has - nearly all the great properties people tout (reliability, consistency, audibility, availability) can be achieved with good old permissioned tech more efficiently, with pretty instant and deterministic finality.
Anyway, I found the series worth watching for the classical consensus material alone.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEGCF-WLh2RLOHv_xUGLq...
[1] https://timroughgarden.github.io/fob21/
[2] https://elaineshi.com/docs/blockchain-book.pdf
[3] https://lewis-pye.com/2022/08/15/consensus-in-50-pages/
Check out Tim Roughgarden’s course on Foundations of Blockchains, Jimmy. Current iteration of web3 and DeFi is a lot of hot air and BS but I think the general idea of trustless computation is bigger than just Bitcoin and that new applications will arise given time.