After taxes, it’s back to school. April 16th is the enrollment deadline for Princeton’s popular Coursera course: Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies.
The course aims to address basic questions – How does Bitcoin work? What makes Bitcoin different? How secure are your Bitcoins? How anonymous are Bitcoin users? What determines the price of Bitcoins? Can cryptocurrencies be regulated? What might the future hold?
The course also promises to lay a conceptual foundation for anyone who wants to engineer secure software to interact with the Bitcoin network.
Educating students, managers, executives, cheerleaders and anyone who expresses an interest in understanding the fundamentals of cryptocurrencies is a prerequisite for mass adoption. The best communicators are able to convey the complexities of Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin, and show how the history of cryptography has given birth to more than 1,500 altcoins. It’s a story that begins with the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 and arrives at today’s thriving and volatile market where developers are experimenting with blockchains, smart contracts and various consensus protocols to eliminate inefficiencies, fraud and manipulation with respect to documents, certifications, products, financial transactions and every business dealing that involves an individual who can be bought and sold or compromised.
The cryptocurrency story is one that expands on the role of digital technology, how it will influence every industry and why digital currencies are better suited for an increasingly digitized world.