Course outline (subject to change):

Classical permissioned consensus.
Types of adversaries and synchrony models, Dolov-Strong Byzantine broadcast protocol, FLP impossibility result for asynchronous consensus, tight fault-tolerant bounds in the partially synchronous model.
Permissionless consensus.
Nakamoto (longest-chain) consensus, guarantees for the Bitcoin backbone protocol, committee-based reductions to BFT-type permissioned protocols, the CAP theorem.
Sybil-resistance.
Proof-of-work, difficulty adjustment, selfish mining; proof-of-stake, VRFs and VDFs, etc.
Bitcoin deep dive.
Block structure, Merkle trees, UTXOs, light clients, scaling Bitcoin via payment channels and the Lightning network.
Ethereum deep dive.
Block structure, gas and the EVM, the EIP-1559 transaction fee mechanism, scaling Ethereum via optimistic and zk-rollups, plans for ETH 2.0.
Newer-generation layer-1 consensus protocols (e.g., Solana and Avalanche).
The multi-chain vision: interoperability and bridges.
DeFi (decentralized finance) primitives.
Stablecoins, oracles.
DeFi applications.
Borrowing, lending, trading via automated market makers.
Miner extractable value (MEV) and interactions between the consensus and application layers.
(Time permitting) Approaches to protocol governance.
(Time permitting) A look ahead: DAOs, NFTs, Web3, etc.