Blockchain (BlCh)

The admin part gives an overview on the lecture content and presents the challenge task for this course (Slides: HS26-BlCh-01-admin_v3.pdf). The second video (news) reports on distributed systems and blockchain news. The first article covers how a company building AI coding agents factored RSA-260, the largest RSA challenge number solved publicly so far, by taking the standard general number field sieve off CPUs and onto GPUs: about 10 times cheaper than the previous state of the art, roughly 13.5 GPU-years or some 400'000 US dollars, done in about three weeks, with most of the engineering done by agent sessions and the human setting goals and benchmarks. Cryptography ages. Then a phishing wave against Trezor and BitBox users, via a breached shared email provider, echoing a real Coldcard seed bug that drained 1'370 Bitcoin. Finally Tor's Android VPN Beta: one circuit per app, Rust-based, used most in censored countries. (Slides: HS26-BlCh-01-news.pdf). The third video is the repetition of Distributed Systems (DSy) (Slides: HS26-BlCh-01-rep.pdf). [88min]

The admin part gives an overview on the lecture content and presents the challenge task for this course (Slides: HS26-BlCh-02-admin.pdf). The second video (news) reports on distributed systems and blockchain news. The first article is about AWS losing customer data in the Persian Gulf after its facilities in Bahrain and the UAE were hit by Iranian drones, illustrating how distributing a system across availability zones does not make it safe if all the zones sit in one region, and why the 3-2-1 backup rule still matters. The next article shifts to the Ethereum Foundation's priorities for the Hegotá upgrade, with two 'must ship' proposals on censorship resistance and Frame Transactions, bringing account abstraction to Ethereum and turning accounts into something programmable. The next topic is about Shopify moving its mobile apps from React Native back to native code, emphasizing how good-enough AI coding tools make a shared cross-platform codebase less necessary. The final article serves as a reminder on the vulnerability of smart contract modules, highlighting how an MEV bot front-ran an attacker trying to steal about 7.7 million dollars from an Ethereum wallet by copying the attack and paying a block builder to be placed first (Slides: HS26-BlCh-02-news.pdf). The third video is the introduction of Ethereum (Slides: HS26-BlCh-02-ethereum.pdf). [80min]

The admin part gives an overview on the lecture content and presents the challenge task for this course (Slides: HS26-BlCh-03-admin.pdf). The second video (news) covers distributed systems and blockchain. Block (formerly Square) joins the x402 Foundation and adds Bitcoin Lightning payments to x402, the open standard named after HTTP 402 "Payment Required" that lets AI agents pay for APIs and digital services. Prediction market Trueo, a small player with about $796,000 in total value locked, plans to move from Coinbase's layer 2 Base to Ethereum for broader integrations. An optimization challenge cut the cost of a quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction by about 79%, from roughly $320 to under $67, though its designers call it a last resort and StarkWare still prefers a soft fork. Finally, a former senior GitHub engineer argues in "Plan mode is dead" that plan documents no longer pay off, since models can explore codebases and decide on their own in a loop of understand, act, inspect, clarify, adjust, and act again (Slides: HS26-BlCh-03-news.pdf). The third video is the introduction into Solidity (Slides: HS26-BlCh-03-solidity.pdf, Examples: HS26-BlCh-03-solidity.zip). [76min]

The admin part gives an overview on the lecture content and presents the challenge task for this course (Slides: HS26-BlCh-04-admin.pdf). The second video (news) covers distributed systems and blockchain. The essay "The Post-AGI Era" argues AGI is already here, depending on how it's defined. "10 tells of a slop UI" lists signs of generic AI-made interfaces, shown on the lecturer's tailon-ng site. A well-known JavaScript and TypeScript author's book income fell to zero by 2026 as AI crawlers replaced human readers. Ethereum's Glamsterdam upgrade hits Sepolia on 6 October with in-protocol proposer-builder separation, block-level access lists and new gas pricing, so contracts relying on fixed gas, like Solidity's transfer and send, need re-testing. Vitalik Buterin's "The cryptographic world computer" predicts that by 2030 Ethereum will rely on cryptographic proofs, fast finality and distributed block building. Finally, Porsche is shutting down its Web3 project after its 911 NFTs drew only about 38'000 dollars in trading last year (Slides: HS26-BlCh-04-news.pdf). The third video is the introduction of x402 (Slides: HS26-BlCh-04-x402, Examples: HS26-BlCh-04-x402.zip). [63min]

The admin part gives an overview on the lecture content and presents the challenge task for this course (Slides: HS26-BlCh-05-admin.pdf. The second video (news) reports on distributed systems and blockchain news. The first article, “Software Engineering is Dead. Long Live Product Engineering.”, argues that cheap AI-generated code shifts value to understanding the problem, and warns that juniors are losing the chance to learn through senior-reviewed code. The next article is a serverless horror story: a self-rescheduling Cloudflare Durable Object alarm ran for 23 days without a spending cap and produced a bill of over $10'000. The next topic covers Yandex losing three of its five data centres to drone attacks, which shows that even distributed systems have limits. The next article reports that Ledger customers in Southeast Asia lost an estimated $86 million after buying devices from an official reseller. The final article covers Ethereum’s Glamsterdam upgrade, now live on the Sepolia testnet used in the lecture’s challenge task, so gas costs may differ from older guides (Slides: HS26-BlCh-05-news.pdf). The third video is the introduction of Fungible Tokens, Stablecoins, Non-Fungible Tokens (Slides: HS26-BlCh-05-tokens, Examples: HS26-BlCh-05-tokens.zip). [73min]

The admin part gives an overview on the lecture content and presents the challenge task for this course ... The second video (news) reports on distributed systems and blockchain news... The third video is the introduction of Wallets and Seed Phrases (Slides: HS26-BlCh-06-wallets). [XYmin]