I'm the lead author of this textbook/lecture series. It's been a couple of years, and we've been thinking about an update. Let me know what topics you'd most like to see. Note that our goal is not to much to teach the details of specific cryptocurrencies as the concepts underlying them. For example, covering Byzantine Fault Tolerance and its application to blockchain protocols is high on my list.
Took the class on Cousera and it was very informative. I often reference the book as well. To be honest, it wasn't the technical aspects of the class but the "political economy" implications of crypto-anarchy that were particularly fascinating. At the time, the Isle of Man regulations had just come out as the first attempt to integrate bitcoin into the market. Prof. Felten's mild pushback against the consequences of a shadow, unregulated monetary system really moderated my own opinions. I would love to see a deeper historical framing of digital money as a way to think about the future.
The recent Filecoin ICO has also gotten attention. And this might be a good place to jump off for a second course: "Applied Crypto Entrepreneurship". How to package, market and sell your existing computing resources, knowledge and skills for financial gain and social good. How blockchains and DLTs can be used not just to encode trust, but transactions for all digital goods and data. Even a section on using machine learning for time series analysis and building algorithmic trading bots. And also including lots of practical exercises in smart contract development and introductions to third-party tools, APIs and BaaS platforms.
Good luck and looking forward to seeing the next version! I'd say you've really got your work cut out for you trying to stay up-to-date on this ever shifting foundation.
I'm utterly sick of the politics around the scaling debate, but it would be comforting to read an impartial design document analyzing the many legitimate technical approaches to adjusting the number of end-user Bitcoin transactions that can happen in a given unit of time. The technical question is not as zero-sum as the warring political factions want us to believe.
Such a discussion would be generally applicable to an abstract cryptocurrency, and thus pertinent to this lecture series.
Thank you so much for doing this and posting it online. I have learned a tremendous amount from your coursera course.
Whilst I appreciate that you are not seeking to teach the details of specific currencies, could you use some of the newer currencies to teach by example?
For example, could you discuss some of the concepts detailed in several of the white papers (and the legitimacy thereof) such as IOTA's tangle or some of the features of the new coins built on ethereum or the utilisation of XRP by banks?
Could you discuss future possibilities such as decentralized exchanges?
Could you cover the topic of SegWit? Since Bitcoin core has adopted that as their first scaling code change post 1MB blocks, I think it would be helpful to understand what's going on with that.
Seems that some new coins such as Ethereum have relatively different designs than those of the old coins. It would be great if you could explain those a bit more.
no, i was talking about the internals of https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin (bitcoin script might seem low level, but there's an actual implementation of it!)
I've been recently starting work on an Ethereum client in Elixir. One of the goals of the project is to make the code clean and understandable. Looking through the repo could be good supplemental reading (for a different but similar blockchain). Also, we're always looking for new contributors.
What if Satoshi isn't a single person but an entire organization?
Specifically what if Satoshi is a decentralized autonomous organization and the original bitcoin paper was an output generated by the Satoshi DAO?
Why would Satoshi do that you may ask. Well they need to make sure the whole blockchain concept was created in the first place or otherwise Satoshi DAO would not have come into existence...
How different is the electronic version on princeton.edu from the printed book? I've seen statements about the printed book being more up to date, but I haven't seen specifics.
