Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Technological Potential
Yorke Rhodes IV, Achal Srinivasan
Spring 2018
Contact Information
Instructor: Yorke Rhodes IV, Achal Srinivasan
Email: Yorke.Rhodes@rice.edu, achal@rice.edu
Office Hours: Hours can be made by appointment via email at any suitable location on
campus
Course Description
Bitcoin has commanded the public’s attention: despite over $300 billion invested at its peak,
it remains widely unregulated, highly volatile, and poorly understood. Designed in the wake of
the 2008 financial crisis, Bitcoin is a digital currency controlled by no single entity. Like the
internet in the early 2000’s, many remain skeptical of Bitcoin’s transformative potential,
failing to understand how and why it rethinks upon traditional financial systems.
In a world where personal lives largely exist as online data, we place blind faith—in people &
institutions we have never met—to protect data from malicious actors. Instead, Bitcoin uses
a public, transparent record-keeping system, a blockchain, to track ownership and transfer of
digital assets without requiring a third-party such as a bank.
Blockchains will allow for trust between participants without the costs of involving “trusted”
third-parties, allowing existing social, economic, and political systems to be redesigned in a
truly democratic manner. Thus, this course will seek to answer: how will blockchains
empower positive and radical change in our increasingly globalized and data-driven
society?
Students should be prepared for exposure to highly interdisciplinary discussions regarding
applying new technology to rethink existing economic & social structures. No technical or
engineering experience is required. Classes will involve discussion of supplementary
background readings and interactive lectures. For their final assignment, students will submit
a proposal for a novel solution utilizing blockchains in a problem space of the student’s choice.
Assessments
2
Term Project
Grade Policies
A student’s ability to pass this class involves a combination of the following factors:
While subject to the discretion of instructors on a case-by-case basis, grades will be
calculated according to the following formula:
Absence Policies
3
Disability Resource Center
If you have a documented disability or other condition that may affect academic
performance you should: 1) make sure this documentation is on file with the Disability
Resource Center (Allen Center, Room 111 / adarice@rice.edu / x5841) to determine
the accommodations you need; and 2) talk with me to discuss your accommodation
needs.
Course Schedule
- Syllabus review
- Course objectives
Lecture Outcomes
4
Tuesday, January 16, 2018
Reading Review:
- Data Abuse Pyramid
- Shifting focus from legal remedies to security practices
Lecture Outcomes
- What are existing approaches to digital currencies? (e.g. PayPal, HashCash)
- Why did these approaches fail? Specifically, what is the double spending
problem, and why is it a requirement for a digital currency to solve this
problem?
Reading: How Satoshi Nakamoto solved the Double Spending Problem (Sections
1-3)
5
Tuesday, January 30, 2018
Reading Review:
- Bitcoin Whitepaper (part 2)
- Proof of Work as computationally impractical to reverse with
chronology
- Incentives for miners to compute Proof-of-Work
- Network communication and collective decision making
Lecture Outcomes:
6
- What is decentralization? What does it mean for a network to be
“decentralized”? How can we measure “decentralization”?
Reading: The Meaning of Decentralization by Vitalik Buterin
Tuesday, February 20, 2018
Reading Review:
- Incentive mechanisms taken from Bitcoin
- Tokens: incentivize actors by assigning them units of a
protocol-defined cryptocurrency
- Privileges: incentivize actors by giving them decision-making rights
that can be used to extract rent
- Rewards: increase actors’ token balances or give them privileges if
they do something good
7
- Penalties: reduce actors’ token balances or revoke privileges for bad
behavior
Lecture Outcomes:
- What are modern examples of incentive design? (e.g. feedback loops used
across social media apps, rewards for civic participation in a democratic
society, etc.)
- How have societal, social, and financial incentives been designed to allow
institutions and corporations to profit from inequities?
- Given a network structure, how can we infer its incentive design?
- How will decentralized applications allow us to restructure networks more
democratically using financial incentives?
Reading: The Token Handbook
8
Tuesday, March 6, 2018
Reading Review:
Lecture Outcomes:
- What is an initial coin offering? How does it differ from traditional investing
vehicles?
- How are ICO’s an evolution of the crowdfunding paradigm made
popular by Kickstarter, GoFundMe, etc.?
- What is the future of the venture capital industry in a world of ICO’s?
- Why are ICO’s under regulation from authorities like the SEC?
- What is a decentralized, autonomous organization (DAO)?
- How do the traditional processes of a [business, organization,
government, etc.] translate to components of a DAO?
- How will the creation of DAO’s change political, economic, and social
landscapes?
- How do DAO’s solve the tragedy of the commons?
- Digital signatures
- Self-sovereign identity
- KYC/AML
Lecture Outcomes:
9
- What existing industries exist which serve as attestations to a digital identity?
- How can our identity be extended digitally which enables unique
business opportunities?
10