Demystifying the Blockchain Hype: Dr. David Evans

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Demystifying the Blockchain Hype

Over the past few years, explosive growth in cryptocurrencies
(especially Bitcoin), has led to tremendous excitement about blockchains as a powerful tool for just about everything. Without assuming anyprevious background in cryptography, I'll explain the cryptographic and networking technologies that make blockchains possible, explain why people are so excited about blockchains, but why you shouldn't believe everything you hear about them.

Bio: David Evans ( https://www.cs.virginia.edu/evans/ ) is a Professor of
Computer Science at the University of Virginia and leader of the
Security Research Group (https://www.jeffersonswheel.org (https://www.jeffersonswheel.org/)). He has taught
a course on cryptocurrencies at UVA ( http://bitcoin-class.org/ ) and been
warning people not to invest in bitcoin since back when one bitcoin was
worth less than a cent. He is the author of an open computer science
textbook (http://www.computingbook.org (http://www.computingbook.org/)), a children's book on
combinatorics and computability (http://www.dori-mic.org (http://www.dori-mic.org/)), and teacher
of one of the world's most popular MOOCs
( https://www.udacity.com/course/cs101 ). He won the Outstanding Faculty
Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, an
All-University Teaching Award, and has SB, SM and PhD degrees in
Computer Science from MIT and has been a faculty member at the
University of Virginia since 1999.David Evans (http://www.cs.virginia.edu/evans/) is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on privacy and security on the web and empowering individuals to control how their data is used and shared. He won the Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia and was Program Co-Chair for the 31st and 32nd IEEE Symposia on Security and Privacy.