Spring 18 Distributed Systems Seminar

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I considered doing a blast from the past edition of the seminar focusing only on classical papers published before 2000. But, nah, I decided, I am doing a blockchain seminar instead. There has been many interesting papers on blockchains and this will be a good chance to catch up with those and look at the distributed systems, concurrency and coordination issues there.

Here is the list. I thank Adem Efe Gencer for suggesting several interesting papers for this list.

Blockchain papers:
  1. Blockchains from a Distributed Computing Perspective 
  2. Blockstack: A Global Naming and Storage System Secured by Blockchains 
  3. IPFS 
  4. Bitcoin-NG: A Scalable Blockchain Protocol 
  5. A Secure Sharding Protocol For Open Blockchains
  6. Enhancing Bitcoin Security and Performance with Strong Consistency via Collective Signing 
  7. Service-Oriented Sharding for Blockchains
  8. The stellar consensus protocol: A federated model for internet-level consensus
Smart contracts papers:
  1. Step by Step Towards Creating a Safe Smart Contract: Lessons and Insights from a Cryptocurrency Lab 
  2. A Concurrent Perspective on Smart Contracts
Cryptocurrencies:
  1. Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin 
  2. SoK: Research Perspectives and Challenges for Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies 
  3. Lightning Network 


Finally, I will also cover some distributed machine learning papers as well:

Related links

2016 Seminar reading list
2015 Seminar reading list

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