Avis et commentaires pour d'étudiants pour Blockchain Basics par Université de Buffalo

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I used this course as a refresher, so it was not hard to follow. However, I think a beginner could have trouble imagining some of the presented concepts. I would have hoped for more mnemonic aids (like "can you make potatoes out of mashed potatoes") and practical examples (like message transfer between Buffalo and Kathmandu). This would really help memorizing these concepts.

Also, the final project is super easy, but can really cause headaches because of software problems. The troubleshooting provided by the instructors only covers an infinitesimal portion of the issues that users run into. This can also be seen in the course's forum. Hopefully, the instructors will make a more extensive guide or provide an alternative to the virtual disk image (e.g. a Docker image).

Last but not least, I would wish for updates on the course material, since the crypto world is changing very fast. I don't mean recording the videos all over again, but e.g. adding a list of notes after each week like "Ethereum moved from ProofOfWork to ProofOfStake". This prevents the course from becoming too outdated.

Despite all this criticism, I can recommend the course in general. It gives a good overview over Decentralization, Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Some might argue that the video content is too brief and not worth it, but in my opinion they really help succinctly explain the concepts that are covered within the external resources mentioned for each week. Those resources do tend to take a lot more time to cover, but what worked very well for me was the approach of watching the lectures, going over all of the resources provided for a given week, and then re-watching the lecture to completely retain all of the information that was provided. The course served it's purpose for covering the contents of the Blockchain basics and so I would recommend it to any individual that may be interested in the field.

This is a good introduction to the basic concepts of blockchain focusing on BTC and ETH. Quiz sessions are well designed and final project is nicely setup and designed. I got nice return on my time spent in this course.The reason that I gave 4/5 stars instead of 5/5 is because I feel the materials can be a little bit more concrete and technical to convey more useful information. For example, there could be more information about mining, to the extent that student can understand Selfish Mining in bitcoin at a high level. While this course is meant to be basics, but we can add some advanced or extension sessions after each week.

Overall the course was very well designed & well paced and the concepts were introduced well. The only gripe I would have is that the final assignment required grappling with setting up VirtualBox and getting the VM started. Not everyone is aware of virtualization so specific primers on how to set this up on Windows etc would be helpful as the current setup pdf / trouble shooting pdfs gloss over some of the common steps or errors.

I faced a couple of issues that got solved only after several tries and restarts and some of this time could have been avoided if only the tips provided were better explained.

Good course, but I think the explanations could've been a bit more "sequential". But I get its point of figuring out stuff on your own and tying it up to whatever's being taught currently in a module; so it's not that big of a deal. The quizzes could've been more difficult and it always turned out being way too easy and underwhelming (even for someone who doesn't know a thing about crypto). But ultimately it does a good job of introducing you to the world of crypto and, despite some unusual bumps in the sequence of teaching, it does what it has to do well. Very informative overall. :)

The course is good basic foundation for Blockchain concepts.

1) I think few of the concepts can be elaborated bit more by the instructor instead of directing to reading material. Honestly, I have googled lot of material on blockchain and felt like I was doing the same in this course.

2) There is some confusion on the project and the instructions should be clear to download the ova file from resources and also the naming is not the same as listed in the instruction document

3) Couple of more quizzes on complete course will be good.

Overall enjoyed the course and the project.

It is a perfect course to get introduced to the blockchain concepts. The course content is compact and on point which makes it easy to understand and grasp. The course provides various guidelines along with curated material that makes the student well versed with the basics of bitcoin as well as ethereum. The course introduces various concepts like smart Contracts, Forks, and Hashing algorithms which inculcate a sense of robustness and security in the blockchain system.

Overall it is an excellent course, to begin with, your journey of understanding blockchains

Good introductory course, but in nearly every quiz there are questions that weren’t explicitly discussed in any of the videos beforehand. I have no doubt the information was contained in the additional readiness material but I sense many participants will use those as additional resources, not primary references for the quizzes, just like I did.

Programming assignment at the end was great, needs updated instructions for installing on macOS. I’d be happy to help with that if you’re interested.

On to Course 2!

The necessity of tx hash root is unclear. What even are receipt root or state root? What is a state in Ethereum — that is not very clear to me after this course.

While speaking of UTXO in Bitcoin, it is not clear what that is. Too formalistic. I could look up the information, that UTXO are smt like chunks of txs and you cannot simply send 100BTC to smb — you need to collect the chunks on your address into 100BTC and direct any excess as a change to your own account to form a new UTXO

T​he course is a basic introduction to blockchain and covers a lot of basic concepts. The lectures are not "great", they are very short and cover very less content and that too not in deep. However, the optional links provided after lectures are very informative. They are time consuming but to understand the subject properly, they are necessary. Also, Links should be regularly updated and new links should be added so that if there is any new content, students are aware of it.

It was an OK class. In terms of content I think that the Blockchain Basics offered by LinkedIn was a bit better and more informative. The assignment at the end needs to be better maintained. I would swap out the old files in the project page for the newer ones in the resources page. I will say though that the assignment at the end really brought it together for me as I got to see how a blockchain interface behaved. So overall I still learned a lot.

Course was well structured, however, some of the key concepts could've been better explained. Especially the chain split concept for Ethereum. Videos in week 1 felt a little rushed, but the other modules were well paced. Nice collection of resources, but some of the links were dead (in Week 4) and links had resources that spanned other modules. Which isn't a bad thing, just caused a little bit of confusion when I organized my work.

Very well designed course. Teaches all the foundational knowledge of Blockchain needed to help you understand and navigate through the complex world of Blockchain. The jargon in blockchain doesn't feel alien to you after taking this course. If you want to explore the world of Blockchain, then this is the place to start. The only problem though is that the course is not up-to-date with the blockchain technology of the current day.

Decent beginning to your blockchain basics and to brush up fundamentals in case you have been reading up on blockchain projects. The last assignment is really what makes spend you a lot of time troubleshooting. Unless you are good at basic troubleshooting, you will struggle at the last step. The problem is not the difficulty of programming assignments, but the setup notes are insufficient to get a straight forward result!

This is a great course for blockchain beginners. The concepts are very clear and the references for understanding the concepts are exceptional. Even though there are miss calculations in the final project regarding the time required including the errors and delays for low-end laptops for the final project, the solutions are mentioned. And it also gave me an opportunity to understand even better while looking at the code.

I think the introductory part to this technology is great. So many misconceptions can arise when street people who think they know enough about bitcoin or ethereum advise peers about what they shoul be doing. I think this introductory course should be a must take for anyone dealing with anything about blockchain. Having said that, I would like more practice quizzes instead of some of the academic ones.

This is a great way to get started with Block Chain. The extra materials of the course will give you a more deep sense of the concepts that the course touches and they are several. Some of the transcriptions are inaccurate, but they are minor type-os. In general this course will give you the sufficient tools for you to understand and comprehend what Block Chains are all about. My score is 4.5

The lecture videos and additional material e.g. like white papers from Satoshi Nakamoto that are provided in the course give students the possibility to directly deep-dive into the most important publications of blockchain. Even though the lecture videos are quite short, it is a very good starting point for students who want to fully understand what's happing in the blockchain.

Interesting and informative, but a bit out of date. If the technology is as constantly changing as the course claims, then there shouldn't be articles and videos from 2017. Instructions for the set up of the final project seemed out of date as well, as many of the files I was expected to download and set up were not labeled the same as they were in the instruction document.