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10 Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Online Courses and Tutorials: Fundamentals to Developments

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It has been over nine years since bitcoin was invented. Over the years, bitcoin and cryptocurrencies had been ignored, doubted, challenged, or viewed only as speculative assets or another bubble. Recently, however, not only public opinion has gradually turned, prestigious universities are taking the underlying technologies of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies seriously, offering rigorous courses on these topics. Here we include 10 in-depth bitcoin and cryptocurrency courses and tutorials by leading experts and scholars in the field. Six of the 10 courses include complete sets of video lectures, and one course contains audio lectures. Most of the courses are free and self-paced without the need of registration. The topics covered by these courses include fundamental blockchain technologies, mining, and game theoretic aspects of bitcoin, scaling and the Lightning Network, smart contract and Ethereum, security aspects of cryptocurrencies, as well as more specialized topics including privacy, anonymity, Zcash, Monero, altcoins, and impacts of governmental regulations. The tutorial Introduction to Bitcoin by Andreas Antonopoulos is a great starting point for anyone who is new to bitcoin.

Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies Arvind Narayanan at Princeton, Joseph Bonneau at Stanford, Edward Felten at Princeton, and Andrew Miller at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This course was taught at Princeton University. 2015 This course was taught by the authors of the book “Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies,” one of the most popular textbooks in the field. The course includes full video lectures, programming assignments, and free pre-publication version of the textbook. It focuses on bitcoin, with a slight touch on altcoins and the ecosystem around them. This is the free version of the Coursera's course.

Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies Dan Boneh and Joseph Bonneau. Stanford. 2016 The course covers diverse aspects about cryptocurrencies. Besides bitcoin, the course includes smart contract and forking with Ethereum as an example. It also covers anonymity, zerocash, as well as cryptocurrencies in the quantum computer era.

Cryptocurrency Security Andrew Miller. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 2016 This course covers topics ranging from bitcoin, bitcoin mining, smart contracts and Ethereum, privacy, tor and cryptocurrencies, and the bitoin P2P networks, all from a security perspective. It also covers Mt. Gox as an example of security failure.

IBM Blockchain Foundation for Developers Ant Cole and Dave Gorman. IBM via Coursera. Starts on 2018/01/15. This course is suitable for software developers who are interested in blockchain development. This course includes video lectures.

Bitcoin Zulfikar Ramzan. RSA via Khan Academy. 2013 This course includes nine 10-minute video lectures on bitcoin. Each short video lecture covers one key concept behind bitcoin.

Bitcoin and Blockchain Technology Jeremy Clark. Concordia University. 2017 The course covers cryptography, hash function, digital signatures, bitcoin and blockchain technologies as well as Ethereum.

Network and Computer Security Ronald L. Rivest. MIT. 2017 This course covers the technical backgrounds of network and computer security and their applications in cryptocurrencies.

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