Morgan Stanley "The Bitcoin Innovation"

Bitcoin (and other decentralized crypto-currencies) have gained significant notoriety in the last year, and have polarized the general population into those that are passionate supporters, and those that believe this insanity will soon disappear. Regardless of this polarization, this emergent innovation provides a solution to a real problem: How to attribute, verify, and transfer digital ownership without a centralized 3^rd party and at the same time prevents ownership ambiguity (e.g. double spend in the case of a currency).

This question, commonly formulated as The Byzantine’s General’s Problem, has been solved by bringing together a number of concepts. These concepts include: asymmetric cryptography, peer-to-peer networks, a stack-based scripting language and a couple of ingenious uses of hashing functions.

The applications of this innovation goes beyond the simple use-case of creating tokens (bitcoins) that can be exchanged in near real-time for goods and services, such as currency and/or a store of value, and include a wide-range of fields such as: times-stamping, spam controls, safe guarding nuclear launch codes, proof of prior art without disclosure, machine to machine commerce etc.

This talk will provide students with the opportunity to learn about:

• Most common concerns and misconceptions
• Concepts that were combined to enable this innovation
• What new services this Technology is disrupting or introducing.