“One can hardly accuse Bitcoin of being an uncovered topic, yet the gulf between what the press and many regular people believe Bitcoin is, and what a growing critical mass of technologists believe Bitcoin is, remains enormous.” - Marc Andreessen
The goal of producing this online course is to provide a holistic overview of Bitcoin from a predominantly non-technical perspective, and to illustrate its potential to transform the way we interact as a global community in the financial marketplace. It is the belief at Draper University that there is a void of material making Bitcoin more approachable, and that the Bitcoin ecosystem as a whole will benefit from the increased exposure and degree of understanding that this course will facilitate.
This course will be produced in Draper University’s multimedia studio September 2014, and is scheduled to be released as a free course on the Draper University Open EdX learning platform in October 2014.
The projected format for the course is to have an on-camera host reading the written portions of the content, interspersed with animations where appropriate. The hosted video segments will then be followed by interviews with interesting members of the bitcoin community in each section to add more color to the covered content, discuss areas that haven’t been covered in-depth, and possibly to illustrate more subjective viewpoints regarding bitcoin.
- What is Bitcoin?
- How does Bitcoin Work?
- Byzantine Generals Problem
- What is Money?
- Limitations of Legacy Payment Systems
- Advantages of Bitcoin
- Early Innovation
- Future of Bitcoin
- Emerging Regulations
- Global Reactions
- Exchanges & Wallets
- Merchant Integration
- Cryptography
- Mining
- Alternative Networks
Right now this is a very rough draft of what will ultimately be the course. We’re posting it now so that we can hopefully get lots of feedback on the mistakes we’ve made and the manners in which we can improve the content. To that end we encourage everyone to take a look, fork this repo, and submit a pull request with your edits.
We are also looking for people who want to be a part of the course either by hosting a section or as a participant in one of the Q & A sessions. If either of these appeal to you or you have any other questions or comments please let us know!
Please address comments or questions to: