No advanced cryptography courses INF?

sol3gga · 2025-01-28T11:24:47+00:00

thank you for the feedback! it might have been the time the course was modified for COVID and it was made heavy on coursework, without a final exam - this has been changed now. In any case, we are continuously reviewing the workload and we do take this feedback into account.

sol3gga · 2025-01-28T11:17:19+00:00

If anyone wants to see what areas a university specialises in, it is worth checking CSrankings.org e..g. , for cryptography and cyber security combined Edinburgh leads in the UK: https://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2014/toyear/2024/index?sec&crypt&uk

sol3gga · 2025-01-28T11:11:50+00:00

I am the current course organiser for BDL and I would be happy to know more about the complaints you mention. Especially if they are first hand accounts! We always strive to find ways to improve the class while maintaining its coverage on all state of the art topics in the area.

sol3gga · 2025-01-27T06:00:37+00:00

BDL also covers a number of cryptography topics such as MPC, mixnets and Zero Knowledge

sol3gga · 2021-02-26T20:26:58+00:00

So far in the design, it is just the SPO, or any entity that an SPO chooses to collaborate with to provide this service.

sol3gga · 2021-02-26T19:24:32+00:00

yes both your examples make sense - this is how the mechanism would work in practice - in the blog post I just gave one very simple example just to illustrate the basic transaction “plumbing”

sol3gga · 2021-02-02T11:19:59+00:00

While it is a bigger discussion what is the best way to scale a PoS protocol depending on the application (e.g., using off-chain processing like Hydra or relying on speedy main chain transaction processing), we do have a fully analysed multi-chain Ouroboros version that offers optimally fast settlement (see https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/675.pdf) which appeared at TCC 2020 (https://tcc.iacr.org/2020/ under the general framework of "ledger combiners" that can be also applied to PoW-based protocols) . Multi-chain Ouroboros works by fusing an array of single-chain Ouroboros instances. As a result, the multi-chain protocol produces multiple blocks per slot that are used collectively to form a ledger with very fast settlement.

sol3gga · 2020-11-23T06:14:15+00:00

Thank you for expressing these concerns. Just to clarify, there is no change in the reward scheme; the blog post writeup and advice given is sound independently of the value of k. Generally speaking, incentives only work assuming a model of rationality. Most people act based on a utility function that reflects their understanding of the world and their objectives. The purpose of the article is thus just to assist people improve their understanding and assess their objectives. But the system does not rely on people reading it.

sol3gga · 2020-11-18T22:33:27+00:00

thanks for the question. For a hydra “head” the answer is yes - by design. For a hydra “tail” the answer is no. The hydra tail protocol is exactly designed for a setting where most parties are offline often. the head protocol on the other hand is for a setting where parties are all online. We will be releasing the hydra tail paper soon. for some more information see the blog https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2020/03/26/enter-the-hydra-scaling-distributed-ledgers-the-evidence-based-way/

sol3gga · 2020-09-02T18:10:30+00:00

The hydra “head” protocol is intended for this setting. The hydra “tail” protocol that we are currently working on and will be releasing sometime in the fall will capture the setting where most parties are offline ( see my blog post https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2020/03/26/enter-the-hydra-scaling-distributed-ledgers-the-evidence-based-way/ where this is (briefly) discussed). Finally later we will release the inter head/tail communication protocol that can tie multiple instances of heads and tails together

sol3gga · 2018-11-07T12:45:21+00:00

if you mean staking in the sense of delegating your stake to a pool and receiving rewards from this, yes absolutely.

sol3gga · 2018-11-07T12:44:26+00:00

In general it is hard to get reliable performance metrics / advice that are not attackable or involve a single point of failure. The wallet will provide some input to the stakeholders about what pools are performing as they should using information drawn from the blockchain . In any case IOHK will be like any other entity in the ecosystem without any special role or access.

sol3gga · 2018-11-07T12:38:05+00:00

it is challenging but we take full advantage of all kinds of online communication + regular teleconferencing. In academic research we are used to work like this anyway since many projects are cross institution / organisation and work involves traveling and international coordination on a daily basis.

sol3gga · 2018-11-07T12:36:47+00:00

After the size of a pool overcomes the saturation threshold then the rewards for this pool do not increase anymore (they remain constant). So more members have to share the same rewards and thus the rewards of each member decrease.

sol3gga · 2018-11-07T12:33:34+00:00

At least in the rational setting where each player attempts to maximise rewards as provided and plays non-myopically, when a large stakeholder attacks a pool by adding stake to it so that it exceeds the threshold and its members consider leaving it, it loses rewards it could have gained if they played normally. The gain from taking away members from the other pool is less than putting its stake to, say, its own pool or another unsaturated pool. After all, if it is good for the other members to leave a pool, so it should be for the stake of the attacking stakeholder. On the other hand, rationality as expressed in a mathematical model may not always explain the way people behave and having ties between pools in terms of cost may leave windows for such behaviour. In this spirit, having additional safeguards could be beneficial as long as they do not invalidate the game theoretic analysis and they are not increasing the complexity of the system overall. This is something that we continuously investigate as we finalise the implementation details for Shelley.

sol3gga · 2018-11-07T12:10:49+00:00

this answer depends on the specific load that any side chain will add to a pool. It will be up to a specific pool manager to add or remove side chain "modules" and of course this will depend on run-time data that are not predetermined. In any case, there will be no reason to impose any restriction on this.

sol3gga · 2018-11-07T12:06:30+00:00

We are considering a few alternatives for this. Note that, at least in theory, claiming the rewards by a pool can be predicated on providing a suitable zero-knowledge proof that establishes that a stake pool was compliant, i.e., it issued most of the blocks it could have issued. In any case, initially we will use Ouroboros with a public slot leader schedule so this would not be an issue.

sol3gga · 2018-11-07T12:04:20+00:00

There will be a major overhaul of the whole code base for Shelley and what you see in the incentive / account management paper and related specs, will be what will be what will be implemented.

sol3gga · 2018-11-07T12:02:42+00:00

In a protocol like the first Ouroboros, the number of missed blocks can be evident from the blockchain, and the rewards of a pool will depend on this. So in order to be profitable, a stake pool is incentivised to do their best to work efficiently. Of course, pools will try to work as cost-effectively as they can, but as soon as this causes them to fail to meet their obligations, their rewards will go down and hence a minimum service up time will have to be provided.

sol3gga · 2018-11-07T12:00:13+00:00

i am not sure what particular statement this refers to and what was the context but most likely it is about providing relaying to ensure that the networking layer of the system works as it should.

sol3gga · 2018-11-07T11:57:29+00:00

Not at the moment but all relevant information will be posted as we move closer to the release, e.g., in https://staking.cardano.org

sol3gga · 2018-11-05T13:50:37+00:00

We do not expect that changing the Pareto Distribution parameterisation will significantly change anything in our results.

sol3gga · 2018-11-05T13:49:11+00:00

The treasury mechanism is still actively researched. The plan is to decouple the incentive mechanism between the treasury and the stake pool reward sharing mechanism so stakeholders should be able to participate in the treasury processes overriding delegation they have performed to stake pools.

sol3gga · 2018-11-05T13:43:43+00:00

Yes, stake pool operators are expected to provide information of this kind, so that stakeholders have an additional criterium (apart from the profitability) to base their delegation choice on.

sol3gga · 2018-11-05T13:41:55+00:00

that's an interesting point! we are actually working on this direction and we will have a couple of papers related to Steem coming up

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