Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Bootcamp

learn three ways to acquire Bitcoin: buy on an exchange, trade peer-to-peer, or mine new coins, while understanding risks of centralization and the importance of moving to a personal wallet.

Explore how Bitcoin mining preserves the distributed ledger by storing, relaying, and verifying transactions across thousands of miners worldwide, and learn how they earn rewards.

Explore how cryptography secures bitcoin by protecting the ledger and enabling secure communication, as miners verify transactions and uphold the system’s integrity.

discover how one-way thumbprint functions uniquely map inputs to outputs, illustrated by a wedding cake mystery. learn how fingerprinting applies to computer data and block chain to detect tampering.

Understand how hashing functions generate fingerprints from any file, yielding a compact, unique output used by bitcoin with sha-256, and how sha-3 provides faster, more secure alternatives.

Learn to verify a downloaded file’s integrity and detect tampering using sha-256 checksums and fingerprints. Use OpenSSL commands to compare fingerprints and show how digital signatures confirm the Ubuntu image.

Explore how mining uses a nonce to hash a block header, including the previous hash and transaction fingerprints, until the hash meets a target with leading zeros.

Explore how hashcash and sha-256 produce a cryptographic fingerprint, how difficulty adjusts the target for mining, and how miners' nonces create proof of work to mint blocks every ~10 minutes.

Learn how the target and difficulty govern bitcoin's proof-of-work: the target inversely follows difficulty, and the network adjusts every ~2016 blocks to maintain roughly ten-minute blocks.

Demonstrates a simplified hash and nonce workflow to visualize proof of work, where miners hash data until the output falls below a target and win the bitcoin block.

Explore how a double spend can occur within the minutes it takes for a block to hash, by broadcasting two transactions from the same source to different addresses.

Explore how Bitcoin uses cryptography to prove ledger integrity and transaction ownership, then compare symmetric key cryptography with asymmetric public key cryptography to understand the core concepts.

Explore how public key cryptography uses a public and private key pair to secure Bitcoin transfers and establish ownership on a distributed block chain.

Explore private key signing and digital signatures, showing how signing with a private key enables verification with a public key and why Bitcoin relies on this opposite order.

Bitcoin uses private key signing to prove ownership of funds via a digital signature verified with a public key. This lecture explains signing transactions and miners' verification of ownership.

Explore how the block chain explorer shows a transaction hash, inputs, outputs, and the script sig. See how private keys and public keys verify ownership across addresses.

Thousands of cryptocurrencies exist beyond bitcoin, with some innovations beyond blockchain basics. Ethereum leads non-bitcoin market cap, while Monero and Zcash illustrate privacy-focused alternatives.

Describe Ethereum as a decentralized payment network like Bitcoin that also runs code on the blockchain, enabling applications across thousands of miners with data-enabled transactions.

Compare bitcoin and ethereum by examining block times, transaction fees, and mining dynamics. Explore how ethereum enables running code as fuel for applications on the blockchain.

Learn how ethereum transactions carry ether to accounts or data to contracts, including method calls and on-chain instructions. See examples like crowdfunding and updating exchange rates.