Blockchain (BlCh)

The admin part gives an overview over this lecture and presents the challenge task for this course (Slides: HS25-BlCh-01-admin.pdf). The weekly news summary covers four articles. The first article covers undersea cable cuts in the Red Sea that disrupted global internet connectivity, demonstrating hardware failure inevitability in distributed systems. The next article discusses Switzerland's launch of Apertus, an open-source multilingual language model representing sovereign AI infrastructure development. The third topic examines Stripe's Tempo blockchain for stablecoin payments, emphasizing the importance of truly permissionless networks over private implementations. The final article covers World Liberty Financial's token freezing controversy, illustrating the contradiction between blockchain's decentralized promises and centralized control mechanisms (Slides: HS25-BlCh-01-news.pdf). The third video starts with the repetition (part 1) of Distributed Systems (DSy) (Slides: HS25-BlCh-01-rep1.pdf). [81min]

The admin part gives an update over this lecture and challenge task (Slides: HS25-BlCh-02-admin.pdf). The second video (news) reports on distributed systems and blockchain news. The first article covers a supply chain attack where compromised NPM maintainers injected crypto-stealing malware into popular packages. The next article shows WSL2 delivering 87% of bare metal performance with I/O slowdowns. The third topic details SwissBorg's $41.5 million loss through their staking partner's compromised API. The fourth article discusses NGINX's new built-in SSL certificate management. The final article mentions PayPal's cryptocurrency payment integration (Slides: HS25-BlCh-02-news.pdf). The third video is the repetition (part 2) of Distributed Systems (DSy), including the Bitcoin/Blockchain introduction. (Slides: HS25-BlCh-02-rep2.pdf). [75min]

The admin part gives an update over this lecture and challenge task (Slides: HS25-BlCh-03-admin.pdf). The second video (news) reports on distributed systems and blockchain news. The first article covers a sophisticated NPM supply chain attack that used worm-like propagation to compromise over 500 packages, targeting cloud credentials on Linux/macOS systems. The next article introduces PrevelteKit, a minimalistic web framework that generates static files at build time for CDN deployment. The third article explains building Docker-like containers from scratch using standard Linux tools and namespace isolation. The cryptocurrency section covers Bitcoin's decline due to ETF outflows and liquidations. The multikernel proposal discusses running multiple Linux kernels on single machines with dedicated CPU cores. The GenAI article argues AI amplifies senior developers rather than democratizing coding. The final article covers Switzerland's successful deposit token proof-of-concept enabling blockchain-based programmable payments using traditional bank deposits (Slides: HS25-BlCh-03-news.pdf). The third video introduces Ethereum and shows how to deploy a smart contract on the Ethereum testnet (Slides: HS25-BlCh-03-ethereum.pdf). The fourth video introduces account abstraction (Slides: HS25-BlCh-03-account-abstraction.pdf). [122min]

The admin part gives an update over this lecture and challenge task (Slides: HS25-BlCh-04-admin.pdf). The second video (news) reports on distributed systems and blockchain news. The first article covers a record 22 Tbps DDoS attack by the Aisuru botnet, reinforcing network unreliability. The next discusses Afghanistan's September 2025 internet blackout affecting 43 million people. The third topic presents nine European banks launching a MiCA-compliant euro stablecoin in 2026, though permissioned blockchain choices may hinder adoption. The fourth article announces Cloudflare's NET Dollar stablecoin for AI-driven payments. The final topic examines Circle's reversible USDC transactions, which contradicts blockchain's core immutability principle (Slides: HS25-BlCh-04-news.pdf). The third video introduces Solidity (Slides: HS25-BlCh-04-solidity.pdf). The fourth video shows the ERC 4437 account abstraction on the Ethereum testnet. (Slides: HS25-BlCh-04-account-abstraction.pdf). [136min]

The admin part gives an update over this lecture and challenge task (Slides: HS25-BlCh-05-admin.pdf). The second video (news) reports on distributed systems and blockchain news. The first two articles show self-hosting email is feasible with proper SPF, DKIM, and DMARC configuration. The next article explains consistent hashing, which minimizes data movement when nodes change by using circular mapping. The following article details the AT protocol's URI resolution in Bluesky, which separates user identity from hosting location for portability. The final article describes South Korea's data center fire that destroyed 750,000 civil servants' files with no external backups, demonstrating why redundancy is critical (Slides: HS25-BlCh-05-news.pdf). The third video introduces fungible tokens (Slides: HS25-BlCh-05-tokens-ft.pdf). [53min]

The admin part gives an update over this lecture and challenge task (Slides: HS25-BlCh-06-admin.pdf). The second video reports on distributed systems and blockchain news. The first article advocates owning your email domain but oversells "full control" when only providing backups. The next discusses self-hosting benefits despite hardware reliability issues. The third exposes Bluesky's centralization problem—despite decentralization claims, alternatives depend on Bluesky's infrastructure, similar to OpenSea's marketplace dominance. The fourth examines how AI assistants enable building small utilities economically, introducing "vibe engineering" as skilled AI-assisted development. The final covers a $192 million Bitcoin short timed minutes before Trump's tariff announcement, linked to BitForex's former CEO, illustrating unpunished manipulation in crypto markets (Slides: HS25-BlCh-06-news.pdf). The third video introduces non-fungible tokens (Slides: HS25-BlCh-06-tokens-nft.pdf). [64min]

The admin part gives an update over this lecture and the 2nd hand-in of the challenge task (Slides: HS25-BlCh-07-admin.pdf). The second video (news) reports on distributed systems and blockchain news. The first article examines homelab complexity, showing self-hosting requires handling storage failures and system deadlocks that cloud providers automate. Next, two companies demonstrate infrastructure optimization: one cut cloud costs 76% by migrating to Hetzner, another gained 6x performance by replacing serverless with stateful Go servers to eliminate caching latency. The following article covers Go 1.25's CSRF protection and authentication security tradeoffs. Next is a warning about fake job interview scams distributing malware-infected code to steal cryptocurrency. The penultimate article describes Paxos accidentally minting then burning 300 trillion PYUSD tokens, exposing centralized control risks. The final article reports the DOJ's largest seizure: 15 billion dollars in bitcoin from a Cambodian pig butchering operation (Slides: HS25-BlCh-07-news.pdf). The third video introduces decentralized finance - DeFi (Slides: HS25-BlCh-07-defi.pdf). [91min]