March 19, 2024

Nine awesome Bitcoin projects at Princeton

As promised, here are the final project presentations from the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technologies class I taught at Princeton. I encouraged students to build something real, rather than toy class projects, and they delivered. I hope you’ll find these presentations interesting and educational, and that you build on the work presented here (I’ve linked to the projects on GitHub if the code is available).

If you haven’t already, you should sign up for the online version of this class we’re teaching starting in a couple of weeks. The class will prepare you to do projects just like these.

Note: you’ll have to turn the volume all the way up and/or use headphones.

Karthik Dhore, Ben Stallworth, Keji Xu created a physical implementation of smart property (on a Raspberry Pi) that can be controlled and traded via the block chain.

Code on GitHub.

 

Dan Kang, Charles Marsh, and Shubhro Saha presented a quantitative analysis of Altcoins based on block chain and price data.

 

Harry Kalodner, Miles Carlsten, and Paul Ellenbogen implemented pay-as-you-go proxy servers using Bitcoin micropayments.

 

Simin Chen, Stephen Cook, Yotam Sagiv, Vibhaa Sivaraman, and Tom Wu built an IDE for the Bitcoin scripting language.

Code on GitHub, demo.

 

Saahil Madge implemented a Bitcoin “beacon”.

Code on GitHub, demo.

 

Walker Davis built a more secure Bitcoin wallet using threshold cryptography.

 

Charles Guo, Frank Jiang, Akis Kattis, Lucas Mayer, Hansen Qian, and Yotam Sagiv built Arbitrum, and Altcoin that enables smart contracts and efficient arbitration.

 

Shivam Agarwal, Pranav Gokhale, Alex Iriza, and Hannah Park developed programming assignments for teaching Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. This was an example of bootstrapping that worked out really well — normally I would have used the help of a team of TAs to develop programming assignments, but no such TAs were available for this class because we didn’t yet have students trained in the ins and outs of Bitcoin! So we made it a class project to develop these assignments. We’ll also be using these in the online version of the class this semester.

 

Ethan Gordon and Patrick Yu implemented CoinJoin.

Code on GitHub.

That’s it for now. See you in two weeks on Piazza!

Comments

  1. SuperTramp says

    Nice presentation on Altcoins. Thanks for including MinCoin. Unfortunately you guys have some misinformation in your video concerning MinCoin.

    1. I am not the creator. This was clearly stated in the original Bitcointalk release thread:https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=165397.0 I was however involved in the creation process in determining: total # of coins to be produced,
    daily inflation rate, block target, diff adjustment, name of the coin and hashing algo used.

    2. There was an early miner incentive. It did not work as well as hoped and only about 12 people were mining the
    coin in the first 24hrs it was released. I however did not mine any of the early coins. I did not start mining the coin
    until the first mincoin pool [vircurpool] was created by community member named: vipah

    3. The information you used to determine that large trade volume on cryptsy was inaccurate as you were assuming I
    was either the creator or one of the early miners. However, I know exactly what trading volume you are talking about as
    I bought 50k MinCoin that day. And I’m pretty sure I know who the responsible party was for that large coin dump. I am
    glad I now have them and have removed them from the exchanges.

    Feel free to email me anytime with any questions you have about MinCoin, Bitcoin or Altcoins in general, if you look at
    my bitcointalk profile I have been around longer than most.

    Thanks,

    -SuperTramp

    PS. We have new domain for the main site: http://mincoin.us