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At Princeton I taught a course on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technologies during the semester that just ended. Joe Bonneau unofficially co-taught it with me. Based on student feedback and what we accomplished in the course, it was extremely successful. Next week I’ll post videos of all the final project presentations.

The course was based on a series of video lectures. We’re now offering these lectures free to the public, online, together with homeworks, programming assignments, and a textbook. We’ve heard from computer science students at various institutions as well as the Bitcoin community about the need for structured educational materials, and we’re excited to fill this need.

We’re using Piazza as our platform. Here’s the course page. To sign up, please fill out this (very short) form.

The first several book chapters are already available. The course starts February 16, and we’ll start making the videos available closer to that date ( you’ll need to sign up to watch the videos Edit: we’ve changed this policy; the lectures are also publicly available). Each week there will be a Google hangout with that week’s lecturer. We’ll also answer questions on Piazza.

How does our textbook (and course) differ from other books on Bitcoin? It’s simple: this is unabashedly a computer science text and course. We connect the ideas we discuss to the rest of computer science, and separate fundamental concepts from implementation details. The hype in the Bitcoin community has sometimes gotten ahead of the technology, and we think that for cryptocurrencies to truly realize their potential, entrepreneurs must go back to the basics, rigorously understand the technology, and build on it.

Sign up now!

Special thanks to students Steven Goldfeder, Shivam Agarwal, Pranav Gokhale, Alex Iriza and Hannah Park for helping develop educational materials for the course.