Cryptocurrency Training Workshops for Bitcoin & Ethereum

Dr Patrick McCorry teaching his 10-week cryptocurrency class which peaked at 350 attendees

If you are an enterprise, organisation or a foundation, and want to help get your R&D team (e.g. researchers & software engineers) up to speed on cryptocurrencies. Then this workshop is for you.

We offer technical deep-dive workshops, based on Bitcoin and Ethereum, tailored to your needs. It covers fundamental topics including distributed systems, applied cryptography, security engineering and the game theory for why it works.

Check out our sample lecture, an introduction to cryptocurrencies, that highlights how a mish-mash of several computer science topics came together to make Bitcoin (and Ethereum) work on a global scale.

After attending our workshop, students will have a good understanding of why and how cryptocurrencies work. They’ll be in a position to build meaningful proof of concept applications, kick-start new product offerings, or even better, contribute towards open-source repositories.

Although — we only have the capacity to perform 1 international workshop per month. If you want to learn more about our training fees and organise a workshop with us, then please reach out at patrick@pisa.watch.

Why are we qualified to teach?

At PISA Research, we are domain experts in cryptocurrencies, distributed systems and applied cryptography.

Our core instructors have prestigious academic background:

• Dr Patrick McCorry is the CEO of PISA Research. He was an Assistant Professor at King’s College London in Cryptocurrencies and Security Engineering. His focus is cryptocurrencies, smart contracts, applied cryptography and decentralised systems. Patrick is the UK’s first PhD graduate in Cryptocurrencies and his work has recently appeared at Devcon3'4'5, Scaling Bitcoin 17'19', Breaking Bitcoin 17, CESC 17, BPASE 19 and SBC19 alongside numerous academic venues.
• Dr Sergi Delgado. He is the CSO and lead Bitcoin dev at PISA Research. His background is in cryptocurrencies and distributed networking. Sergi is the first Spanish PhD graduate in cryptocurrencies and his work has appeared in Scaling Bitcoin 2018 and 2019, Financial Cryptography 2017 and 2018 as well as other academic venues and journals.

We don’t just stop at the theory, all team members are engineers:

• All team members (Patrick, Sergi, Chris, and Salvatore) are involved in building our third party broadcasting service that will be released in 2020 Q1. We get our hands dirty coding solidity contracts, tooling in Ethereum (etherjs, waffle, truffle, web3, etc), Bitcoin’s lightning network and our in-house Bitcoin tooling. Over the years, we have open-sourced popular projects including the open vote network and BTC Tooling.

Together, we understand both the theory and state-of-the-art engineering involved in cryptocurrencies. This is why the workshops are designed to help students understand why something works before getting their hands dirty in the programming.

Long-term experience running training workshops

Frequently 50–30 attendees including oversea students who fly in to join!

Weekend Blockchain Developer Workshops. Patrick McCorry has been the lead lecturer at weekend developer bootcamps every month in London for the past 2 years with Laurence Kirk. It covers Ethereum research and development.

Blown away by the interest in the first class of the 10-week course

10-week Cryptocurrency Class. While an Assistant Professor at KCL, Patrick McCorry hosted a successful 10-week cryptocurrency class in early 2019 with a peak attendance of ~350 students. It covered a range of topics from scalability of blockchains, financial privacy & why the blockchain is a natural home for financial cryptography.

Sergi Delgado teaching on-hands lightning network programming

Bitcoin Training Workshop. Within PISA, co-founders Patrick McCorry and Sergi Delgado have offered Bitcoin Developer Workshops with a special focus on the Lightning Network. Fidelity labs was the most recent client.

Topics that we can cover:

Please check out a sample lecture, intro to cryptocurrencies, to judge the quality of our content.

Over the past few years, we have put together a variety of teaching material for the training workshops. Some of it includes (non-exhaustive list):

• Motivation & Why: Intro to cryptocurrencies from being a political hedge to a playground for an emerging financial system.
• Blockchain as a Data Structure: UTXO vs Account-based, alongside why cryptography is used for authentication & integrity, but privacy is hard.
• Cryptography & the Blockchain: Self-custody of funds and the rise of ZKP and privacy-coins.
• Problems surrounding on-chain scalability: Why 1GB blocks are not yet possible; what is a compact block or a fraud proof? And how can we distribute the task of global verification?
• Privacy, or lack of, on Cryptocurrencies: In 2011, Bitcoin was advertised as a global, cheap, fast and anonymous currency. We now know Bitcoin is the most traceable currency in the world. So how can we make it more private and how to popular privacy coins work?
• Myth of decentralisation. Teams and activists likes to shill that their product / solution is “decentralised”, but what does this mean in practice? If crypto is not really decentralised, then what is it all about?
• Building & Breaking Smart Contracts: An algorithmic third party with public state enforced by a global network. How contracts are broken time and time again (devops199 anyone?).
• Hands-on programming in Bitcoin and Ethereum: Want to deep-dive into working with the UTXO model? Or how to write secure solidity contracts?
• Future upgrades to Bitcoin: SIGHASH_NOINPUT, TAPROOT, GRAFTROOT, etc.
• Bitcoin’s Lightning Network: A truly peer-to-peer routing network? How does a HTLC work? What is a liquidity service provider and the problems around it? What is it like programming using LND or c-lightning? Hack-a-lapp today.
• History of Off-chain Channels: One-way payment channels (Spilman & hashcoin) straight up to smart contracts via off-chain channels.
• Commitchains, Plasma & Rollup: Most of us have experienced off-chain scalability for the past 10 years; but it has been fully custodial and riddled with large-scale hacks. Can we have the same experience in a self-custody manner?

While we build a tailored training workshop for you, it is important to remember that a workshop is not a lecture series.

We encourage students to ask questions during the workshop and very often they take advantage of it. After all, we can only prepare material we think they want to learn, but we might not cover all edge-cases, so the discussion really brings out the learning experience to ensure it exactly matches what your team needs to learn.

If you would like to learn more about our training fees and organise a workshop with us, then please reach out at patrick@pisa.watch.

Of course, thanks to the wider cryptocurrency community, for the continued support over the years, our workshops would not be the same without it.