The first week is a conceptual introduction to blockchains and it will serve as a high level overview of the key areas to understand. The second week will serve as a general reframing of what blockchain technology can be and how to think about it from the perspective of different economic frameworks.
We encourage curiosity, exploration and a willingness to collaborate as we all learn about this new and innovative space together. This is a basic introduction to blockchain, so no Wolfram Language knowledge is necessary as a prerequisite.
If you’d like to get started learning Wolfram Language, try our Elementary Introduction here!
Feel free to use this post as a way to collaborate and share ideas, materials and links to other information you find useful. I hope you’ll join us!
Steph, Looking forward to our blockchain kick-off today.
Great idea to use this post as a way to collaborate and share ideas, materials and links outside of the online session. Please Reply to Steph’s post above for a new thread, or reply directly in the threads below.
Blockchain is a relatively new scientific field of interest, very polemical and fascinating. Please add your questions, view points, and wisdom in this thread.
If you don’t have a Wolfram Software - download the Wolfram|One 15-day trial. Then you can download the notebooks and “play along”
This study group is building up to the creation of a MOOC with notebooks that utilize the computational powers of the Wolfram Language (WL). You can check out courses other than blockchain on the Wolfram-U website:
I would also like to mention an interesting application of cryptographic mathematics for blockchains to the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. The modern blockchain financial systems with cryptography such as RSA are based on large prime numbers.
For more information I recommend
What do you think would need to happen to validate the provenance of these pieces? And if turned into NFTs, under what authority would people claim the “original” vs the “copy”? This would be trivial if NFTs were created at the moment of the art’s inception, but going back into history is more challenging. What do you think?
Quote from article: “We were talking about provenance and ownership of the pieces. What if I was able to take them back and turn them into NFTs?”
Provenance - A record of ownership of a work of art or an antique, used as a guide to authenticity or quality.
Here are the recommended resources from Day 1’s notebook. We will talk about Lessons from the Crypto Wars briefly, and the Bitcoin White Paper in detail today in Day 2 .
Hi Peter, I’m always looking at practical applications for NFTs. Since you bring up laser technology, rather than LIDAR I’ve been wondering about using Open Path Lasers for detecting Enteric Methane Reduction with a herd of cows and minting verified Methane abatement NFTs. What do you think? There might be some analytical art involved there as well.
Yesterday, on Day 1, we had a question on whether there existed ‘quantum encryption’ on blockchains. I’m going to ping this question over to @Dariia Porechna and see if she can help answer this.
Henrick-Mario, what you ask regards a huge area of study, and my lectures next week will try to get at precisely this question, although by no means answer it.
Software is ubiquitous and its code and the technology around it is directly or indirectly regulating our actions and our engagement with each other and with devices.
The story of the first transatlantic cable is quite enthralling: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/transatlantic-cables D. Geere “How the first cable was laid across the Atlantic” Wired : BUSINESS 18.01.2011
It prompts some corrections to the Day 1 lecture materials. Thanks. M
Fascinating indeed! I should have clarified that in the 1850s it was not optical fiber being laid deep undersea, instead was copper wire. Was there something else to note, Michael?
This is how mining is described on one of the sites:
"What motivates miners? The network holds a lottery. Every computer on the network races to be the first to guess a 64-digit hexadecimal number known as a “hash.” The faster a computer can spit out guesses, the more likely the miner is to earn the reward. "
Could you please deliberate. What’s the “lottery”?
What is given about the number to be “guessed”.
More generally (from another description):
What kind of math problems are offered?
How are they posed?
What are the “initial conditions”?
it broke so many times! Just imagine two boats in the ocean laying it down and then pulling it out, again and again?
Morse himself supervised the project!
Here is also a good example of learning hard way:
"On 3 September, 1858, the cable failed. In an attempt to increase the speed of transmission, the voltage on the line was boosted from 600V to 2,000V, and the insulation on the cable couldn’t cope. It failed over the course of a few hours, and it would be another six years before the capital was raised for another attempt. “It’s still down there”, John Kincey, a principal engineer from Cable & Wireless Worldwide and an expert on transatlantic undersea cables, told Wired.co.uk. “Most of them are.
They’re cleared near the beaches so that they don’t interfere with fishing, but in most cases, they’re still at the bottom of the sea.“And this is a great reminder:” So next time you’re reading about a transatlantic fibreoptic cable, remember the steadfast work of Frederick Gisborne and Cyrus Field back in 1858, in a pair of boats in the middle of the Atlantic”.
I understand that not all of this fits the “blockchain narrative”, but adding a link could be instructive and … inspiring.
Thank you for pointing to this story!
Best.
M
There is possibly an additional relation of the cable story to cryptocurrency. As we’ve learned, the cables are still there, at the bottom of the ocean. And this provides an opportunity for mining the copper
PS: And, btw, “by 1850, a link had been laid between Britain and France”. Apparently, this one can be called “the first”
The ‘lottery’ in question is quite simple. The miners take as input
The current state of the blockchain
Their own address (so that rewards can be awarded to them if they ‘win’)
(and this is the “lottery” part of it)
A randomly chosen guess, or ‘nonce’ number. It can be any 32-bit number.
These three inputs are then fed into a hashing algorithm (specifically double SHA-256), which returns a (pseudo)random number.
If the result of the hash has a sufficient number of leading zeros, i.e. 0000001a34b16a… then the block can be added to the chain, and the reward is added to the miner’s address.
In summary, miners guess random numbers, plug them into double SHA-256, and then repeat that process over and over again until somebody gets one that satisfies the above condition. Computers designed for mining are typically specialized hardware (such as ASICs, Application Specific Integrated Circuits) designed exclusively for running SHA-256 over and over.
The ‘number of zeros’ is actually variable, and is designed to control the ‘difficulty’ of mining a new block. More leading zeros required means more guesses required, and the condition automatically adjusts so that on average a block is added to the chain every ten minutes or so.
I think it would interesting if there was a blockchain with a similar philosophy to the metric system and the International System of Units. For example, the United States imperial system came out of a system of hundreds of weights and measures with as much variety as the number of cryptocurrencies today.
By contrast, the metric system was designed by a group of mathematicians and scientists after the French Revolution. Joseph Louis Lagrange, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Gaspard Monge, Marquis de Condorcet and Jean-Charles de Borda worked on the definition of the meter, kilogram, and second.
Eventually, the metric system became the International System of Units/SI which was redefined on 20 May 2019.
I am wondering if there’s a mathematically based cryptocurrency that isn’t about new features and making a lot of money.
I think BitCoin is like video games where the first few times you level up or gain experience its easy and then when you’re getting faster at gaining land or territory or technology the cost of everything goes up dramatically and if it took 1 hour to get to level 50 it takes another hour to get to level 100 for example. I think this is not a very good system to throttle how fast you mine BitCoin in a way similar to lots of video game environments.
The growth rate could be linear, logarithmic, polynomial such as squared or cubed or a higher power, or exponential or factorial. I wonder what the best asymptotic complexity of blockchain mining would be?
O(1) constant time best
O(log n)) very good
O(n) linear time complexity good
O(n^2) quickly infeasible when scaled for example a million becomes a trillion
O(n^3) harder still
O(ln a a^n) exponential traveling salesman problems and graph theory problem
O(n!) NP hard and NP complete problems must be solved with approximation algorithms and metaheuristics.
The question I am considering What is the best level of difficulty and hardness for a job, or mathematical problem or activity?
I’m a university student and I wonder if there will be a way to get a diploma with a nonfungible token by May 2024. I am excited about this aspect of NFTs because I could lose my paper high school diploma more easily than a high school diploma with an NFT in an Internet server run by Google or a database for example.
There was a question today (Day 3) on whether Europe regulates Crypto.
The European Commission has created MiCA which is proposed regulation that will fill the legal vacuum surrounding cryptocurrency service providers. It will also determine which currencies are regulated more versus less i.e. whether they be securities, stable coins, or utility coins. There is already some regulation on this (an on local complementary currencies), but this MiCA proposal will significantly update that. MiCA will likely not be enacted until 2024. The latest document I found is from 2021.
The purpose of regulation “is to ensure EU consumers get access to innovative yet safe crypto-assets without compromising market stability.” They also plan to put in place a pilot on distributed ledger technology (DLT) and crypto-assets in the financial sector. Perhaps this link offers a summary.
