Crypto currencies have been at all rage in the last few months, with the price of Bitcoin and other Altcoins skyrocketing and achieving new all time heights.
This is very interesting and since there is the idea that the technology supporting all of these coins is revolutionary, some saying it can be used to solve many problems that we currently struggle with (or turn thing more transparent). I needed to take a look at how it works internally.
For anyone trying to understand and work with “Blockchain” and its new style of “consensus”, playing and just using the coins and wallets is not enough. All the things that happen in the background are complex and require the understand of several mathematical properties.
So where to start?
There are many books (and I’ve read a few of them), but some just approach the technology from an high level and from a user perspective. Others are good and complete, but very dense.
I took another approach to complete my understanding of the internals of the technology. I joined and recently completed the online course of “Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies” from Princeton University, available on the Coursera platform.
The content, even though the course dates from 2014/2015, is solid. It covers the basic concepts and the internals of bitcoin very well, foundational things that do not change that often. Content isn’t just thrown at you, they build up your knowledge on the matter.
The only issue, in my humble opinion, is the timing of the first graded assignment, which is given to you before the lessons on those concepts are explained (but you can watch those lessons and comeback to the assignment later). On the remaining assignments some context and better explanation of the terms on the code might help, but eventually you end up understanding what they mean. Otherwise the discussion forums will guide you in the right direction.
Overall, truly recommend this course (that is free at the moment) if you desire to get an initial and deeper knowledge of the system and not just the user perspective.
