BLOCKCHAIN 1: BITCOIN AND SMART-CONTRACTS
Instructor: Julien Prat (CNRS, CREST and Ecole Polytechnique)
Course prerequisites:
The course is designed for students in Economics, Business and Computer Science. Besides their training in quantitative methods, no specific knowledge about Blockchains is required.
Basic programming skills in Python will also be useful.
Course content:
The financial industry was until recently a very concentrated sector. This is becoming less and less true as a wave of innovations greatly lowers the barriers to entry and intensifies the degree of competition among providers of financial services. Disruptive technologies are being implemented at an increasing pace, leading to major changes in the realms of payments, lending and borrowing, insurance, wealth management, venture capital. To understand this revolution, one needs to have a good grasp of technological innovations as well as of the economics of the financial sector. This course will introduce students to both dimensions, allowing them to identify how financial services can be improved with new approaches.
The course will put a strong emphasis on the blockchain protocol because of its disruptive potential, hopefully preparing the audience for the next wave of innovations. We will adopt a hands-on approach with the objective of enabling students to monitor transactions over Bitcoin’s blockchain.
- Teaching coordinator: Prat Julien