Research for Practice

Our fourth installment of Research for Practice covers two of the hottest topics in computer science research and practice: cryptocurrencies and deep learning. First, Arvind Narayanan and Andrew Miller, co-authors of the increasingly popular open access Bitcoin textbook, provide an overview of ongoing research in cryptocurrencies. This is a topic with a long history in the academic literature that has recently come to prominence with the rise of Bitcoin, blockchains, and similar implementations of advanced, decentralized protocols. These developments--and colorful exploits such as the DAO vulnerability in June 2016--have captured the public imagination and the eye of the popular press. In the meantime, academics have been busy, delivering new results in maintaining anonymity, ensuring usability, detecting errors, and reasoning about decentralized markets, all through the lens of these modern cryptocurrency systems.