Demystifying Bitcoin: From Message Passing to Shared Memory

This lecture covers the history of Bitcoin, explaining its journey from the financial crisis of 2008 to becoming a widely traded asset. It delves into the technical aspects of Bitcoin, such as wallets, transaction validation, mining incentives, and smart contracts. The lecture also explores concepts like state machine replication, consensus universality, and the impossibility of achieving consensus in asynchronous systems. It discusses the challenges of implementing consensus among processes using registers and the consensus number of objects. The lecture concludes with a detailed explanation of the Payment Object, its specifications, algorithms, and the possibility of its asynchronous implementation.