
Princeton Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies Online Course Now Open - roasbeef
https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/randomwalker/sign-up-now-for-the-bitcoin-and-cryptocurrency-technologies-online-course/
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randomwalker
I'm the lead instructor. Let me know if there are any topics you'd like to see
in particular. Here's the syllabus from the version of the class I taught at
Princeton:

[http://randomwalker.info/teaching/fall-2014-bitcoin/](http://randomwalker.info/teaching/fall-2014-bitcoin/)

(P.S. about 200 students enrolled in the first couple of hours. Great to see
the level of interest.)

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nemild
It may be helpful to talk about consensus based systems like Stellar and
Ripple. Is this included in your altcoins section?

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randomwalker
Thanks for the suggestion. We discuss it briefly, and one of the programming
assignments is based on Ripple. It could use a deeper discussion, I'll work on
that.

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oafitupa
Don't forget to mention that their consensus algorithm simply doesn't work.
That's why they made it 100% centralized "temporarily" (without even asking,
so apparently it was 100% centralized even before that). They themselves said
exactly that in a blog post. Also, the creator of Ripple dumped all his coins
before joining Stellar.

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Adlai
Here's the Stellar team's blog post about this. While there's no attempt to
conceal this, it's also not being spelled out clearly enough: the
Ripple/Stellar "consensus" model is a centralized and does NOT provide the
guarantees which Proof-of-Work does in Bitcoin.

[https://www.stellar.org/blog/safety_liveness_and_fault_toler...](https://www.stellar.org/blog/safety_liveness_and_fault_tolerance_consensus_choice/)

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Dowwie
Why didn't you use Coursera for this MOOC? Roughly 5% of students registered
for a MOOC actually complete the course. If you'd like to educate the world,
do it through a platform that could actually make it possible.

