About this course: To really understand what is special about Bitcoin, we need to understand how it works at a technical level. We’ll address the important questions about Bitcoin, such as: 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? After this course, you’ll know everything you need to be able to separate fact from fiction when reading claims about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. You’ll have the conceptual foundations you need to engineer secure software that interacts with the Bitcoin network. And you’ll be able to integrate ideas from Bitcoin in your own projects. Course Lecturers: Arvind Narayanan, Princeton University

Created by: Princeton University

Taught by: Arvind Narayanan, Assistant Professor
Computer Science

Language	English
How To Pass	Pass all graded assignments to complete the course.
User Ratings	4.6 stars Average User Rating 4.6See what learners said

Syllabus

WEEK 1

Introduction to Crypto and Cryptocurrencies

Learn about cryptographic building blocks ("primitives") and reason about their security. Work through how these primitives can be used to construct simple cryptocurrencies.

6 videos

Graded: Scrooge Coin

WEEK 2

How Bitcoin Achieves Decentralization

Learn Bitcoin's consensus mechanism and reason about its security. Appreciate how security comes from a combination of technical methods and clever incentive engineering.

5 videos

WEEK 3

Mechanics of Bitcoin

Learn how the individual components of the Bitcoin protocol make the whole system tick: transactions, script, blocks, and the peer-to-peer network.

6 videos

WEEK 4

How to Store and Use Bitcoins

This week we'll explore how using Bitcoins works in practice: different ways of storing Bitcoin keys, security measures, and various types of services that allow you to trade and transact with bitcoins.

7 videos

Graded: Consensus from Trust

WEEK 5

Bitcoin Mining

We already know that Bitcoin relies crucially on mining. But who are the miners? How did they get into this? How do they operate? What's the business model like for miners? What impact do they have on the environment?

5 videos

WEEK 6

Bitcoin and Anonymity

Is Bitcoin anonymous? What does that statement even mean—can we define it rigorously? We'll learn about the various ways to improve Bitcoin's anonymity and privacy and learn about Bitcoin's role in Silk Road and other hidden marketplaces.

6 videos

WEEK 7

Community, Politics, and Regulation

We'll look at all the ways that the world of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technology touches the world of people. We'll discuss the community, politics within Bitcoin and the way that Bitcoin interacts with politics, and law enforcement and regulation issues.

8 videos

Graded: Block Chain

WEEK 8

Alternative Mining Puzzles

Not everyone is happy about how Bitcoin mining works: its energy consumption and the fact that it requires specialized hardware are major sticking points. This week we'll look at how mining can be re-designed in alternative cryptocurrencies.

5 videos

WEEK 9

Bitcoin as a Platform

One of the most exciting things about Bitcoin technology is its potential to support applications other than currency. We'll study several of these and study the properties of Bitcoin that makes this possible.

5 videos

WEEK 10

Altcoins and the Cryptocurrency Ecosystem

Hundreds of altcoins, or alternative cryptocurrencies, have been started, either to fix Bitcoin's perceived flaws or to pursue different goals and properties. We'll look at everything that goes into an altcoin and how they interact with Bitcoin.

4 videos

WEEK 11

The Future of Bitcoin?

The use of Bitcoin technology for decentralizing property, markets, and so on has been hailed as a recipe for economic and political disruption. We'll look at the technological underpinnings of these proposals and the potential impact on society.

4 videos

FAQs

How It Works

Coursework

Each course is like an interactive textbook, featuring pre-recorded videos, quizzes and projects.

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Creators

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. It is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution.

Ratings and Reviews

Rated 4.6 out of 5 of 298 ratings

Great course the amount of info i learnt from this as well as the cryptocurrency talks @thebandwidthbarn makes this worth while, note you need some java dev skills

This course is somehow old 2014, but completely shows the how the bitcoin works, and in fact how crypto currencies work in general. They have an awesome chapter about anonymity. Extra material weeks are really good.

Very good course,

I really liked the course, I am currently a full-time online student and I seek to enroll in other helpful and very interesting courses that I can actually feel that I can get use of in the future and this course was exactly that. The coding assignments were hard, but very fun, and I learned a lot from them.

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Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies

Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies

Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies