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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Blockchain Basics by University at Buffalo

4.6
stars
7,497 ratings

About the Course

This first course of the Blockchain specialization provides a broad overview of the essential concepts of blockchain technology – by initially exploring the Bitcoin protocol followed by the Ethereum protocol – to lay the foundation necessary for developing applications and programming. You will be equipped with the knowledge needed to create nodes on your personal Ethereum blockchain, create accounts, unlock accounts, mine, transact, transfer Ethers, and check balances. You will learn about the decentralized peer-to-peer network, an immutable distributed ledger and the trust model that defines a blockchain. This course enables you to explain basic components of a blockchain (transaction, block, block header, and the chain) its operations (verification, validation, and consensus model) underlying algorithms, and essentials of trust (hard fork and soft fork). Content includes the hashing and cryptography foundations indispensable to blockchain programming, which is the focus of two subsequent specialization courses, Smart Contracts and Decentralized Applications (Dapps). You will work on a virtual machine image, specifically created for this course, to build an Ethereum test chain and operate on the chain. This hands-on activity will help you understand the workings of a blockchain, its transactions, blocks and mining. Main concepts are delivered through videos, demos and hands-on exercises....

Top reviews

TT

Nov 18, 2018

This is an introductory course to Blockchain. The supplemented material (in other words self-study) is excellent and in my opinion is the only way to master the concepts and details of this discipline

SJ

Feb 4, 2022

Really learned a lot about the fundamentals of blockchain, being a software engineer looking into blockchain. It just got me up to speed with the underlying workflow of blockchain and more. loved it.

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1701 - 1725 of 1,875 Reviews for Blockchain Basics

By Angel C C

•

Nov 1, 2018

It is usual from teachers in the university to record the course as a reading of their lessons. When this happens, you feel that it is better to read a book. So like in other courses, sometimes is a little bit bored and difficult to follow. Should be good to add more and better diagrams and media to explain the lesson and less time with the image of Bina talking.

Anyway, is a good introduction.

By Antti K

•

Dec 30, 2019

The course provides the necessary basics of the technology called blockchain, and it manages to open important related concepts together with the optional reading materials ( some of which were deprecated and removed from the websites). I'd recommend the course Blockchain Basics for anyone interested in blockchain and the ideas behind it.

By Andrew B

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Sep 30, 2021

The course is great, but I think it's very low level and very wordy considering the information has to be processed. I think a better solution is to provide the readings and have users answer more complicated questions related to them. I was also disappointed to find the coding assignment was actually just clicking buttons.

By Shashank S

•

Apr 7, 2021

Course content is good as it convers the basics. The programming assignment (week 4) is simple but really frustrating from user experience point of view. Content creators should work on that. Discussion forum is already full with the challenges and difficulties, learners are facing while submitting this assignment.

By Renal K

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Nov 27, 2021

The course is ok, the main value is in providing links to interesting external articles and in giving the overall structure of which topics to study and in what order. In the course videos the concepts are explained in a very academic language. It looks like the professor is just reading the material on camera.

By N. C B

•

Oct 11, 2021

I took the course already with some basic knowledge, nevertheless i couldn't help to feel a little bit lost with the spoken "jargon" that relates to this technology. I guess for a non tech-savyy, it might be a little hard to grasp anything without the use of more visuals, graphics, visual examples, etc.

By Domenico G

•

Mar 31, 2020

The Course is well done, all the material (internal and external) al good and very useful.

Just the final exam I think is not calibrated, I think that is better to make a quiz exam rather than a practical exam where the only complexity is to start the VM but after every step is suggest where to click

By Ines F

•

Feb 19, 2021

The course is a great way to introduce some of the basic and main concepts of blockchain. For someone that hasn't any background on programming sometimes it can get a bit confusing or hard to catch. However, it is a great to way to acquire knowledge on blockchain technology.

By Ivan M S

•

Oct 7, 2020

I really liked the video lecture! Everything is on top! But there are also many disadvantages: some links to additional materials are no longer valid, the final assignment contains a bunch of errors and lack of documentation. It cannot be completed by 100 points

By Nicolai M

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Mar 12, 2022

I liked the extra material that referenced to other blogs and websites and the quizzes after each video.

I think the slides could have been a lot better visually. There was hardly something explained on them but just orally explained. You could do better there.

By James F

•

Sep 30, 2019

I thought the material was at times rushed, and the last project was too scripted and in fact confusing (why is a DAG being generated if this is an Ethereum course?) There could have been more support to explain what we were doing in the final project as well.

By Yusuf M

•

Oct 30, 2022

The course is good. The "optional" material is actually very important and I would recommend making it required reading for understanding the course because the lectures themselves are sometimes not entirely explanatory and seem to be a little bit scattered.

By Gianfranco G

•

Oct 10, 2020

The videos and quizzes were excellent and easy to understand, but the end course project was a whole different matter. There were so many unspecified conditions needed for the project and there weren't good instructions. It was very frustrating at the end.

By Saurav K

•

Feb 9, 2020

course module is very good but the assingment part is rubbish 5 times i downloaded ethereum.ova but while importing it was not found means its really bad i completed all but due to this technical issue i will not be able to complete the course.

By Anirudh S

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Aug 22, 2020

Its a decent course which manages to teach you stuff that you don't know or do know to some extent but what it fails to do is that its a bit fast paced and not elaborate enough since the topics are a little complex to beginners

By ABHISHEK K

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Dec 18, 2021

The articles included in the course are very informative but detailed explanation in lecture would have been fruitful. Lecture seems to be very concise without explanations where each and every statement is concept in itself.

By shashwat g

•

Jul 5, 2020

The course was good but the reason to give it 3 stars is that the programming assigment was a bit of complicated to install and no proper guidance was given to install it correctly. Videos could have been bit of simpler.

By Marelf A R F

•

Jan 7, 2019

Tuve problemas con la ultima tarea dado que el programa que baje de los links dados por el curso no permitia correr el software ethereum.

Con lo anterior, no se dió una alternativa distinta para poder terminar el curso.

By Suchal R

•

Oct 8, 2018

This course is too basic. Hardly goes over the concepts. The lady barely explains anything. I already knew most of the stuff so I know that others who don't know this stuff would still have no clue at the end of course.

By Xavier V

•

Aug 11, 2022

The content is out of date and some links even got a 404 error. Some instructions are not clear and/or updated. It would be better if the content stays inside the course as oposed to referring to many external links.

By Holden L

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Aug 29, 2019

The course is not organized logically so that it is not coherent and easy for learner to understand as a whole. The assignment is not well design to actually test learner's interpretation on the course knowledge.

By Christian S

•

Jul 18, 2021

informative; the assignment was a pain to setup. spent way more time on getting the setup to work than the actual exercise. i think it would be helpful to have those in the cloud and accessible to students.

By Edward L

•

Sep 14, 2023

Some of the information is outdated and I had a difficult time with the final test using a Mac M1. I had to use my old Mac Book Pro with the Intel chip and use VMware to run the Ethereum Environment.

By RAMEES P S

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May 10, 2020

The video lectures explained clearly but could have packed more information. The final assignment might need an overhaul since most people are finding it difficult to understand what is required.

By Voice o A

•

Nov 4, 2021

I wish things were explain in little more deep. I felt more like watching a power-point presentation than attending a to a course. Moreover, the videos could have been a bit more elaborative.