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Welcome to the first lecture in our
series on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

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I want to start by introducing the four
lecturers who are going to be speaking in

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the series.

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The first lecturer is Joseph Bonneau.

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He's a post doctoral researcher in
computer science at Princeton University.

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The second lecturer is me, Ed Felten.

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I'm a professor at Princeton in computer
science, and in the Woodrow Wilson School.

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The third lecturer is Arvind Narayanan.

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He's a computer science
professor at Princeton.

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And fourth, our special guest
lecturer is Andrew Miller.

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He's a PhD student in computer
science at the University of Maryland.

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There will be eleven lectures in total.

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In this lecture number one,
we're going to do two things.

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First, we'll introduce some cryptographic
primitives that turn out to

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be necessary for
talking about cryptocurrencies.

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In particular,
we'll talk about cryptographic hashes and

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digital signatures.

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And we'll talk about some of the ways
in which those are used to build

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cryptocurrencies.

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And then at the end of the lecture, we'll
start talking about cryptocurrencies.

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And I'll give some examples
of simple cryptocurrencies.

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That illustrate some of the design
challenges that we need to deal with.

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I want to apologize for covering the
cryptographic material at the beginning.

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Unfortunately we have to eat some
of our vegetables a little bit,

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in order to lay groundwork for
the cryptocurrency stuff.

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So if you came for the cryptocurrency
stuff let, me assure you first of all.

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That we will get to it in this lecture.

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And that having laid
the groundwork in this lecture.

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There's going to be a lot more
specifically cryptocurrency-focused

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material in later lectures.

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All right, so let's get to it.