The reading is open ended. You can find and read as much content as you feel is necessary to understand the topic sufficiently well that you can explain it to others.
The presentations are done as a group, but all group members should contribute. They should be around 10 minutes long, and certainly no more than 15. They do not need fancy slides (please, don't use time on that), but if you'd prefer to accompany the presentation with some textual bullet points, then this is OK.
You could aim to provide information on some of the following areas for your topic:
- General overview
- Pros and cons of different approaches
- Any alternatives that exist
- Your own and/or the groups' thoughts on the topic
- Anything else that you found interesting during research, or might help others learn!
Please complete the form to express your preferences on which topics you find the most interesting. We will try to sort you into groups based on your aligned preferences. Please note that not everyone will get their first or second preference, but we'll do our best!
Description What are BIP158 Compact Block Filters and how do they work? What makes them different to and an improvement upon BIP37 Bloom Filters?
Description We always hear that reusing addresses in Bitcoin is bad for your privacy. Why is this the case? Dust attacks are a way of trying to get a target to reuse addresses. How do these dust attacks work, and what has been done to try prevent them?
Description What are the privacy guarantees and leaks in the Lightning Network? What is the asymmetry between the sender and the receiver's privacy? Which research proposals affect the privacy status quo?
Resources
Description What is the purpose of a CoinJoin transaction, and what are the trade-offs? What are the current main implementations, and why do some of them need a centralized coordinator? What is the difference with CoinSwap?
Description What are the different ways Bitcoin can be timelocked, and how do they compare? How did Satoshi originally envision timelocks? Have these options always been available, or how/when were they forked in? What are currently the main use cases of timelocks?
Description What are PTLCs and how do they improve upon HTLCs in routing in the Lightning Network? There are possible issues with introducing PTLCs, such as cycle jamming. Describe what this is and what the potential fixes might look like.
Resources