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Demystifying Bitcoin
This lecture covers the history of Bitcoin, from its creation in response to the 2008 financial crisis to its current value and trading practices. It explains the role of users, participants, engineers, and scientists in the Bitcoin ecosystem, detailing concepts such as wallets, transaction validation, mining incentives, smart contracts, consensus algorithms, and the challenges of implementing asynchronous payment systems. The lecture also delves into the technical aspects of hashing, state machine replication, message passing, and the consensus number of objects in distributed systems.