Introducing “Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin”
An open classroom initiative by Rice Blockchain.
Bitcoin has commanded the public’s attention: despite over $300 billion invested at its peak, it remains widely unregulated, highly volatile, and poorly understood. Designed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Bitcoin is a digital currency controlled by no single entity. Like the internet in the early 2000’s, many remain skeptical of Bitcoin’s transformative potential, failing to understand how and why it rethinks upon traditional financial systems.
In a world where personal lives largely exist as online data, we place blind faith — in people & institutions we have never met — to protect data from malicious actors. Instead, Bitcoin uses a public, transparent record-keeping system, a blockchain, to track ownership and transfer of digital assets without requiring a third-party such as a bank.
Blockchains will allow for trust between participants without the costs of involving “trusted” third-parties, allowing existing social, economic, and political systems to be redesigned in a truly democratic manner. Thus, we seek to answer the following question:
How will blockchains empower positive and radical change in our increasingly globalized and data-driven society?
At Rice Blockchain, we’re excited to help people learn more about these nascent industries & technologies. As our first accredited educational initiative, Yorke and I will be teaching the first for-credit blockchain course at Rice University, named “Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin”. As staunch supporters of open education, we plan to open-source all course materials via Medium, and hope that this will inspire peers to share our content or start similar educational initiatives with great foundational content.
We hope increasing education around these highly-technical solutions will help demystify the overarching goals, new concepts, and plethora of projects in this emergent space. We predict that these efforts will help drive mainstream development and adoption of decentralized platforms.
If you’re interested in peer-reviewing our content, please feel free to make comments in the discussion or inline via Medium. We highly value feedback, and want to ensure that our content is accurate & meaningful — all help is appreciated. You can also reach out to us at blockchain@rice.edu with any private feedback.
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