[talks] Steven Goldfeder will present his FPO, "Off-chain protocols for cryptocurrencies" on Wednesday, 8/29/2018 at 2:00 PM in CS 402.

[Nicki Gotsis]

Steven Goldfeder will present his FPO, "Off-chain protocols for cryptocurrencies" on Wednesday, 8/29/2018 at 2:00 PM in CS 402. 


The members of his committee are as follows: Adviser: Arvind Narayanan; Readers: Edward Felten and Rosario Gennaro (City College - CUNY); Examiners: Matt Weinberg, Mark Zhandry, and Arvind Narayanan 

Everyone is invited to attend. A copy of his thesis is available in CS 310. 

The thesis abstract follows below. 

The limits of Bitcoin’s scripting language motivate the need for o↵-blockchain protocols 
that extend the functionality of Bitcoin scripts. These protocols are run out-ofband 
by the transacting parties, but they are constructed in a manner that cryptographically 
binds them to on-chain scripts. Even with the advent of Ethereum, which 
provides a much richer scripting language, there are still privacy and scalability benefits 
to running o↵-chain protocols, even when on-chain analogs exist. 
We present o↵-chain protocols for a variety of applications as well as a general 
framework for o↵-chain smart contracts. An important tool for constructing o↵-chain 
protocols is threshold-signatures, a primitive that enables distributing the signing 
power of a given public key into n shares, such that at least k shares are required to 
produce a signature from that key. We show how to construct threshold signatures 
that are compatible with Bitcoin, and we then use this primitive to build o↵-chain 
protocols for privacy-preserving access control and escrow services. Turning to more 
advanced smart contracts, we present o↵-chain protocols for the fair-exchange of 
digital goods and services for payment. Finally, we present Arbitrum, a private and 
scalable smart contract system which enables running arbitrary smart contracts for 
which the code is executed o↵-chain and disputes are resolved on-chain. 



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