Blockchain Basics
Coursera
This first course of the Blockchain specialization provides a broad overview of the essential concepts of blockchain technology – by initially exploring the Bitcoin protocol followed by the Ethereum protocol – to lay the foundation necessary for developing applications and programming. You will be equipped with the knowledge needed to create nodes on your personal Ethereum blockchain, create accounts, unlock accounts, mine, transact, transfer Ethers, and check balances. You will learn about the decentralized peer-to-peer network, an immutable distributed ledger and the trust model that defines a blockchain. This course enables you to explain basic components of a blockchain (transaction, block, block header, and the chain) its operations (verification, validation, and consensus model) underlying algorithms, and essentials of trust (hard fork and soft fork). Content includes the hashing and cryptography foundations indispensable to blockchain programming, which is the focus of two subsequent specialization courses, Smart Contracts and Decentralized Applications (Dapps). You will work on a virtual machine image, specifically created for this course, to build an Ethereum test chain and operate on the chain. This hands-on activity will help you understand the workings of a blockchain, its transactions, blocks and mining. Main concepts are delivered through videos, demos and hands-on exercises.
More resources on Blockchain Fundamentals
Andreas Antonopoulos Website
Andreas M. Antonopoulos collects over 600 free talks and Q&A videos here, alongside his books on Bitcoin and open blockchains. Browsing the archive gives grounded answers to questions about consensus, wallets, custody and protocol design.
Blockchain Specialization
A four-course University at Buffalo specialization: Blockchain Basics, Smart Contracts, Decentralized Applications and Blockchain Platforms. It explains hashing, consensus and Ethereum, then has learners write Solidity smart contracts and build a simple Dapp on a test network.
Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies
To really understand what is special about Bitcoin, we need to understand how it works at a technical level. We’ll address the important questions about Bitcoin, such as: How does Bitcoin work? What makes Bitcoin different? How secure are your Bitcoins? How anonymous are Bitcoin users? What determines the price of Bitcoins? Can cryptocurrencies be regulated? What might the future hold? After this course, you’ll know everything you need to be able to separate fact from fiction when reading claims about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. You’ll have the conceptual foundations you need to engineer secure software that interacts with the Bitcoin network. And you’ll be able to integrate ideas from Bitcoin in your own projects. Course Lecturers: Arvind Narayanan, Princeton University All the features of this course are available for free. It does not offer a certificate upon completion.
ethereum.org
Official community website for Ethereum, maintained with support from the Ethereum Foundation. Explains accounts, transactions, gas, the EVM, staking and smart contracts, and hosts developer documentation and tutorials, so readers can understand how the network works and start building applications.
Ethereum.org Learn
The Ethereum Foundation's index of introductory material on accounts, wallets, nodes, validators, transactions and gas. After working through it you can explain how the Ethereum network processes transactions and choose a wallet with informed reasoning.
Blockchain Demo by Anders
An interactive web page where you edit block data and watch hashes, nonces and chain links break in real time. Working through its hash, block, blockchain and distributed tabs shows why tampering invalidates every subsequent block.