Crypto Assets - An Intro to Digital Currencies and DLT

Overview: From the prism of the creation of the Bitcoin, it discusses the various cryptographic primitives needed to provide a working system; viz. digital signatures, Merkle trees, hash functions, zero-knowledge proofs. Important topics addressed include how validators solve the consensus problem. What is the basic problem of Byzantine agreement and what approaches are available to solve this in both provisioned and non-provisioned block chains. It describes what a blockchain is and how an append only database maps onto standard financial systems such as ledgers, making blockchain a natural fit in financial applications. Moreover, it explains how data is placed on a block chain, the techniques that are used to validate state transitions on the blockchain and how Zero-Knowledge techniques can be used to solve these problems, while maintaining data secrecy.