#69 overall
Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies
Coursera
6 recommenders · 6 threads · recommended in 4 years, 2017–2022 · score 7.3
An introductory Princeton course on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technologies, taught by Arvind Narayanan, covering how Bitcoin works, its mechanics and incentives, and the cryptography behind it. It is offered free on Coursera.
Commenters call it a good primer that explains the concepts clearly, with one saying it was superb and has stuck with them for years.
Machine Learning & AIbeginnerfreevideo lectures#bitcoin#cryptocurrency#blockchain#cryptography#narayanan
Recommendations by year
20062026
As an aside - the author of the post is Princeton professor Arvind Narayanan. I took his free Cryptocurrency course on Coursera and it was superb. He really broke down all of the concepts in an easy to understand way that has stuck with me for years.
Princeton have a MOOC where you build a basic blockchain from scratch, maybe on EDx. I recommend that course but can’t find it on my phone right now!
The "Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies" on Coursera helped me gain an understanding cryptocurrencies. Until I took that course I knew very little about the subject.
It's possibly a little dated now, but it's a good primer.
https://www.coursera.org/learn/cryptocurrency/
I'd love to hear what other cryptocurrency courses others recommend.
As many others mentioned, Andrew Ng's course on Machine Learning on Coursera was also very good.
https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning
I have this guilty pleasure of occasionally pulling up /r/CryptoCurrency just to find something terrible to laugh at.
(I do think there are cryptocurrencies worth a bet in the long term, if you can afford to take a chance. Better to start with basics like the Princeton course and form your own judgements.)
I recommend the Princeton course on Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies, available free on Coursera:
https://www.coursera.org/learn/cryptocurrency
I took this last year and found it very informative
I was looking for a good primer and I found the original Bitcoin paper itself to be a pretty good starting point: https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-paper
Furthermore, I suggest the Princeton cryptocurrency intro course on coursera [1]. If you have CS background, you can skip the explanations of hashing etc and concentrate on the mechanics and incentives in cryptocurrencies, which are illustrated quite nicely.
[1] https://www.coursera.org/learn/cryptocurrency
So I've been feverishly researching both topics, and how to learn them. I've decided to take these 2 courses from Coursera (starting soon, in Oct 2016). Both are free, and for the ML course, one can pay after completing it and get a certificate (there's no certificate for the Bitcoin course).
https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning
https://www.coursera.org/learn/cryptocurrency#
Hope you too will join these, and post updates on this thread right here.
I highly recommend the Princeton book and associated video lectures as a place to get started. It does a great job of framing things in the context of the wider fields of cryptography and distribute systems research.
http://bitcoinbook.cs.princeton.edu/
Actually, I think Bitcoin and Magic: the Gathering tell us something. Talent generates value, and sometimes that value is realized in an asset that has currency-like properties.
Why's a dollar valuable? It's debt from a powerful nation state.
Why is the Black Lotus valuable? Richard Garfield deployed his talents to making a game that people really wanted to play, and the BL is a scarce, in-game resource.
Why is BTC valuable? Someone deployed computational talent to make a cryptocurrency work. It's non-trivial work, and I'd probably take a BitCoin course on Coursera to really get into the guts of how the problem is solved.
I don't like BTC. I don't like the enforced deflation that, as we've noted, give the profits away to the ones who get in early, and create what has the potential to be an enormous asset bubble. (No one can predict such things; it could go to $1000 or $10,000 before it finally crashes, but I'm pretty damn sure its long-term destination is zero.)
I saw this with Magic and it sucked. That time, though, it wasn't intentional. They didn't take "the power 9" out of print to payoff early adopters on the secondary market; they did it to balance the game. No one expected, at that time, that these cards would eventually be worth over $1000 each. (Now I feel like an idiot; when I got into Magic, Moxen were out of print but only $100-125. Unaffordable for a teenager; a computer science textbook, at 29.)
So there are already processes that turn talent into a currency, but those are one-shot. It'd be more interesting to see a continuous, reliable proof-of-work system to turn talent into currency that isn't beholden to some corporation.
However, this is complicated by the fact that talent is intermittent. Proof-of-work systems work for commodity work (concave) but talent shines on the convex. Convexity is the defining economic problem of the 21st century, and for more than you'd ever want to read on this topic, start here:
http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/gervais-macle...