Blockchain Landscape and AI Renaissance: The Bright Path Forward

Known for powering cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, blockchain is seen as a disruptive technology capable of revolutionizing a wide variety of domains, ranging from finance to governance, by offering superior security, reliability, and transparency founded upon a decentralized and democratic computational model. In this tutorial, we first present the original Bitcoin design, along with Ethereum and Hyperledger, and reflect on their design choices through the academic lens. We further provide an overview of potential applications and associated research challenges, as well as a survey of ongoing research directions related to byzantine fault-tolerance consensus protocols. We highlight the new opportunities blockchain creates for building the next generation of secure middleware platforms and explore the possible interplay between AI and blockchains, or more specifically, how blockchain technology can enable the notion of "decentralized intelligence." We conclude with a walkthrough demonstrating the process of developing a decentralized application using a popular Smart Contract language (Solidity) over the Ethereum platform