Princeton University & Coursera, thank you…
…for serving the course ‘Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies’
Last week I took the accelerated version of the coursera course ‘Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies’ This is a brief review.
Overall impression: good value for no money. I can recommend it to anyone interested in a profound historical voyage through the bitcoin and altcoin landscape and techniques to extend your timeless knowledge.
The course dates back to 2014. Two years is a long time in cryptocurrency world. Some topics really need to be updated or replaced. Because history has been written differently in too many cases discussed in the lectures since their making.
The lectures are clear, well-founded and illustrated by explanatory sheets Sometimes the lecturers present a bit wordy. But that might as well be a good thing. Maybe a novice student likes to hear the same material in different ways. More experienced students can fast forward through the videos without losing grip.
The structure of the course (11 weeks) is well-build and implemented. The cryptography basics are tailored to the subject blockchain but presented in a way that is much broader applicable; for example in signing, authentication, security.
Quizes are mainly located at the end of a topic, which is very pragmatic to sutdent that rather like to listen to lectures instead of having to watch it all the time and manually have to skip or answer questions. The quizes have a good level and fit the subject at hand.
Three of eleven lectures require coding to get the grade. However, to me it seems a missed opportunity that as a student you have to program in Java to be able to pass the exam. Maybe it would be better to make a pseudocode variant of the programming assignment? I’d rather like to be tested on my understanding of the essentials of the (flow and structure of the) code and not its particular (Java) syntax.
The trainers have done a great job explaining both the basic — and the harder to grasp techniques of cryptocurrencies and their potential for future development of decentralized systems.
Have a look here!:
Please be aware though that many of the lectures that treat future developments might well have become obsolete because overhauled by reality of the past two years since the making of this course.
Good luck.
