Stanford University introduced a new 10-week course, offering to study building bitcoin-enabled applications. The first course session titled “Overview and Introduction to Bitcoin” was held on 4 January 2016.

It is recommended that the students have some previous familiarity with the programming language Python and the operating system Unix, as well as with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but “no previous Bitcoin knowledge is necessary,” according to the course’s official website. The participants must have a 21 Bitcoin Computer.

The students will become familiar with the basics of bitcoin and bitcoin-enabled computing in the first two weeks. The rest of the time will be dedicated to building bitcoin-powered versions of some internet services. The examples, given in a university press release, list services such as “search engine that takes in a small amount of bitcoin for each query, a social network that allows individuals to buy internet celebrity endorsements for bitcoin, and a content site that charges a small amount of bitcoin for each page view.”

The course will be taught in English in person on Monday and Thursday every week or online via a private channel in Slack by two instructors, namely Balaji S. Srinivasan, co-founder and CEO of 21 Inc, and Dan Boneh, Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.

The developers have also decided to open a free online version later this year, due to the great interest in the course demonstrated both by the Stanford University’s students and by people all over the world.

Last year many universities worldwide added courses on cryptocurrency and bitcoin technology to their educational programs. Last spring Princeton University launched a publicly available course on cryptocurrency technologies. In August 2015 Stanford announced its first online course on cryptocurrency and cybersecurity. Later, in September Imperial College London opened the Centre for Cryptocurrency Research and Engineering. In October the Catalonian Pompeu Fabra University in collaboration with Barcelona Bitcoin Community started a series of academic discussions on cryptocurrency. Blockchain seminars have been held also by the Russian HSE Lab.

Elena Platonova