As we’ve been following for you here at CCN.com, plenty of people are curious to learn more about Bitcoin. It was the fourth-largest “What is” search on Google last year, and this means the interest in Bitcoin is definitely not defined by its US Dollar price. Education is the biggest obstacle Bitcoin faces, both now, and in the future. With that in mind, some of the most prestigious schools in the United States are beginning to teach our brightest minds more about “The Future of Money”.

Princeton Follows NYU’s Bitcoin lead, Unofficially

NYU was the pioneer of this movement to teach the students more about Bitcoin in the Fall 2014 semester. Princeton University has now joined the ranks of the learned for Spring 2015. In response, almost 400 students have already signed up for the course, again, highlighting heightened demand, especially amongst the savvy American youth.

This course seems focused on the technical side, and will address questions to the novice 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 for Bitcoin?

Princeton’s course creators make the following claims to those who complete the 11-week course:

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 projects. Note: this is not an official Princeton University course.

Also read: A Day in NYU’s Course on Cryptocurrencies

Not sure what the last sentence means since it will be for Princeton students at Princeton facilities, taken in lieu of other Princeton courses. Probably some legal semantics is involved. Princeton administrators must have signed off on the course and the campus location, so semantics aside, Princeton will start teaching Bitcoin with one video course per week beginning February 16th, 2015.

In addition, each week there will be a Google Hangout with that week’s lecturer. Plus, there will be five “programming assignments” where students will be asked to build various components of “simplified Bitcoin-like cryptocurrencies”. Sounds like Make-your-own-Altcoin week is coming soon.

The official name of the course that is not an official Princeton course is “BTC-Tech: Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies.” The lecturers include Arvind Narayanan, Joseph Bonneau, Edward Felten (Princeton University), and Andrew Miller (University of Maryland).

Images from Shutterstock.



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