Princeton Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies Online Course Now Open | Hacker News Reader

Princeton Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies Online Course Now Open

freedom-to-tinker.com

97 pointsroasbeef25 comments

I'm the lead instructor. Let me know if there are any topics you'd like to see in particular. Here's the syllabus from the version of the class I taught at Princeton:

http://randomwalker.info/teaching/fall-2014-bitcoin/

(P.S. about 200 students enrolled in the first couple of hours. Great to see the level of interest.)

Piazza is asking me for a princeton.edu email address (I tried to sign up through the link you gave above). Can I sign up for the course if I am not a Princeton student (or any student of a university, for that matter)?

Ah, you can't sign up directly on Piazza without a Princeton email, but if you sign up using the Google form link, we'll enroll you on Piazza. (We do this manually; about once a day.)

Thank you!

Apologies for not finding it, but could you link to the Google form link?

Link to signup is here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1PpEMVa0Eby2X0K_P-PfhShO2g25...

Thanks!

I think there's an easier way. Piazza has a "Set an access code to enroll" feature on the following page (third option down on the left column)

https://piazza.com/product/features

    To limit enrollment in your class, by default a school 
    email domain is required to self-enroll. If your school
    does not provide students with school email addresses, 
    instead a class access code is automatically set to 
    limit enrollment in your class.

It may be helpful to talk about consensus based systems like Stellar and Ripple. Is this included in your altcoins section?

I took the course this semester (and loved it--hope the materials can be helpful to all).

We had one assignment that focused on achieving consensus in the face of adversarial nodes, similar to the systems used in Stellar and Ripple, so those were included in the course, to a degree.

Thanks for the suggestion. We discuss it briefly, and one of the programming assignments is based on Ripple. It could use a deeper discussion, I'll work on that.

Don't forget to mention that their consensus algorithm simply doesn't work. That's why they made it 100% centralized "temporarily" (without even asking, so apparently it was 100% centralized even before that). They themselves said exactly that in a blog post. Also, the creator of Ripple dumped all his coins before joining Stellar.

Here's the Stellar team's blog post about this. While there's no attempt to conceal this, it's also not being spelled out clearly enough: the Ripple/Stellar "consensus" model is a centralized and does NOT provide the guarantees which Proof-of-Work does in Bitcoin.

https://www.stellar.org/blog/safety_liveness_and_fault_toler...

Ethereum and other similar projects that intend to "recreate the Internet" or at the very least be some sort of much more capable "Bitcoin 2.0" networks.

What more does this course offer compared to Introduction to Digital Currencies[1] by the university of Nicosia?

[1] digitalcurrency.s3.amazonaws.com/dfin-511.pdf

The course provided by UON didn't have any programming assignments, so that could count as an important difference.

Colored coins and smart contracts.

1. Using Multisig transactions and Oracle signers to implement Smart Contracts on Bitcoin blockchain.

2. Ethereum Smart Contracts and DApps.

This probably belongs here. It's pretty close to what you're looking for, and it won me the Miami Bitcoin hackathon a few weeks ago. Source code is in the youtube description: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlmk5tnoKBQ

Code examples were mentioned. What's the tech-stack going to be? eg is it going to be the bitcoind C code, any of the javascript ports (there's some native JS crypto stuff, as well as I think it's bitpay made node bindings for bitcoind), or all of the above?

I'd very much like to see Counterparty discussed in that curriculum. I'm the community director of this open source platform, so let me know if you'd like me to skype in and guest lecture!

Could you please add more information about programming assignments to course description? The level of programming proficiency, what programming language are you going to use, etc.

In my opinion it would be also helpful to add info about background expectations and expected workload (e.g. ~5h/week).

Blockchain - what types of contracts work well and what kind don't? Could you share a Devils Advocate viewpoint of the blockchain -- major assumptions, pitfalls, etc?

I have enrolled - so far, Piazza seems a bit too spammy for my taste. When does the course start?

Why didn't you use Coursera for this MOOC? Roughly 5% of students registered for a MOOC actually complete the course. If you'd like to educate the world, do it through a platform that could actually make it possible.

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