Princeton University’s Popular Online Bitcoin and Crypto Course Maps Out Fundamentals to Promote Adoption

Princeton University is rebooting a free online class about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. The class is open to the public and currently has over 9,000 interested students.

Designed to help users separate “fact from fiction,” course lecturer Arvind Narayanan aims to give students a solid technical grasp of how Bitcoin works, what makes it secure and what determines the price of Bitcoin. Students will also learn skills to engineer secure software that interacts with the Bitcoin network.

The instruction will cover several fundamentals.

• Cryptographic building blocks (“primitives”)
• Bitcoin’s consensus mechanism
• Bitcoin protocol: transactions, script, blocks, and the peer-to-peer network
• Different ways of storing Bitcoin keys, security measures
• Bitcoin mining
• Bitcoin anonymity
• How Bitcoin interacts with politics and law enforcement
• Regulation issues
• Altcoins and the crypto ecosystem
• Decentralization and the potential impact on society

Launched on September 4, 2015, the 11-week-long class is free to audit. It starts on January 6th with another session beginning on January 21st. Commentators suggest that the course requires a background in programming to tackle course work and assignments. It requires roughly 18 hours to complete.

The course is provided by Coursera, the world’s largest online learning platform.

You can check out the listing here.

Image via Wikimedia Commons