Computer Science Colloquium - Gavin Andresen
Fri, November 3rd, 2017
4:00 am
- This event has passed.
On Cryptocurrencies and Distributed Ledger Tech
Billions of dollars have poured in to Bitcoin, Ethereum, “initial coin offerings” and other “blockchain-based” ideas. I will describe what they are, and will explain why I think most of them are ill-conceived and over-hyped. I will also give a very brief overview of some academic work being done on distributed ledger technologies, and offer some possible directions for research in this wild, crazy, interesting space.
Gavin Andresen was the lead developer for the Bitcoin open source project from 2010 through 2015, and is the former Chief Scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation. Before 2010, he worked as a software engineer (and sometimes founder/CTO) at a variety of places, ranging from a large Silicon Valley company to three-person startups to a machine learning research group at UMass. Gavin received his bachelor’s degree in computer science from Princeton University in 1988, and lives and works in Amherst, Massachusetts.