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Cryptocurrency Classes Are Coming To Campus (nytimes.com)
While the price of Bitcoin has dropped since Christmas, the virtual currency boom has shown no signs of cooling off in the more august precincts of America's elite universities. The New York Times: Several top schools have added or are rushing to add classes about Bitcoin and the record-keeping technology that it introduced, known as the blockchain. Graduate-level classes this semester at Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Duke, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Maryland, among other places, illustrate the fascination with the technology across several academic fields, and the assumption that it will outlast the current speculative price bubble. "There was some gentle ribbing from my colleagues when I began giving talks on Bitcoin," said David Yermack, a business and law professor at New York University who offered one of the first for-credit courses on the topic back in 2014. "But within a few months, I was being invited to Basel to talk with central bankers, and the joking from my colleagues stopped after that." For a class this semester, Mr. Yermack originally booked a lecture hall that could fit 180 students, but he had to move the course to the largest lecture hall at N.Y.U. when enrollment kept going up. He now has 225 people signed up for the class.
Andreas also put his Mastering Bitcoin book on GitHub for free.
Most things can be explained very simply, this guy takes forever to say simple things, sounds more like a salesperson than a tech talk, I dont find him very convincing on that basis alone but whatever, to your points.
1. Takes him 10 minutes to say increase the blocksize and another 14 minutes to say Lightning network or sidechain.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Blo...
Sidechains are divorced from the block so require other layers of trust and are therefore not blockchain.
2. complete waste of my time, was a sales pitch more than anything.
3. 51% attack is completely possible, in 2 cases especially.
a. The network has fallen out of favor and everyone has moved on to the new bestest coin ever, and the only people left on the old garbage coin for slow people are just hacking it to get whatever 'value' they think they can steal and its trivial to have enough processing power.
b. New super good coin is 'worth' a bajillion megabucks and now its trivial to spend 1 billion dollars to do an attack.
https://blockchain.info/pools
Only 3 of the top 4 pools need to conspire to further their own self interest, less than that is necessary for shorter term control of the network, even if they are able to disrupt the network for their own purposes with 30% of the hash rate.
One of the biggest failures of new technology, especially when advocates are vociferously certain that its so perfect and cannot fail is a lack of imagination, this has taken down the most secure certain absolutely guaranteed 'things' time and time again. Someone will find a hole and take advantage of it over and over in ways not originally even considered.
Maybe there is a simply a spam attack possible that delays all transactions for many hours or days.
Maybe there is a trust attack where proof appears from multiple sources.
When does a classic man in the middle attack become 'worth it', impersonate the work originator.
Who knows.
Thats if its not regulated out of use by governments in short order anyways.
4. was a sales pitch again.
In practice Bitcoin is a complete failure, too expensive, too slow, doesn't scale, too much risk, not convenient.
Blockchain may be interesting but V2.0 looks useless so far. No reason it can't be looked at some more but my original descriptions stand from where I sit.