Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Bootcamp

Examine digital money and its value in virtual economies, from bitcoin to in-game currencies like interstellar credit and world of warcraft gold, and the rise of decentralization.

Explore how to create a digital currency using a simple ledger with Rainbow Coin, where three users gift and trade coins, building a basic transaction history.

Explore how Bitcoin operates as a peer-to-peer payment network powered by cryptography and social consensus, built on a public ledger of blocks and mining.

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.

Learn how bitcoin transfers work using addresses and private keys, how new addresses receive funds, and how the blockchain serves as a distributed, tamper-resistant ledger across thousands of computers.

Watch a real Bitcoin transaction unfold across wallet apps, showing addresses, private keys, QR codes, and fees, with confirmations recorded on the block chain.

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.

Explore hash functions like SHA-256, revealing deterministic fingerprints that produce fixed 256-bit outputs, remain quick to compute, resist reverse engineering, and exhibit strong collision resistance with dramatic input sensitivity.

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.

Learn how to secure passwords by hashing them with sha-256, a one-way function, store only hashes in a database, and verify logins by hashing input and comparing to stored hashes.

Explore how bitcoin uses blocks and the blockchain to secure a distributed ledger of transactions, with block fingerprints and hashing that prevent tampering.

Explore how miners secure the Bitcoin blockchain through proof of work, solving a very difficult math problem, and compete for the twelve and a half bitcoin reward.

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 mining and proof of work create tamper resistance in Bitcoin by securing blocks with valid hashes and building the longest valid block chain, deterring past tampering.

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.

Learn how block size shapes Bitcoin transactions, why fees rise with congestion, and how miners prioritize by fee, illustrated by historical spikes and scaling debates.

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.

Compare RSA and elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA) in public key cryptography, showing how public and private keys enable secure, one-way communication and the math of exponents and modulo.

Learn how RSA uses a public key, a private key, and a modulus to encrypt and decrypt messages via modular exponentiation, illustrated with a small triplet and real-world scale.

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.

Demonstrate how a private key signs a document fingerprint to create a digital signature, verifiable by the public key to prove identity and integrity.

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.

Explore smart contracts, code that runs on the blockchain enforced by computers, and how deeds illustrate transferring ownership across thousands of nodes with downtime and censorship resistance.

this lecture shows how an election contract on the ethereum network uses smart contracts to enable a fair, tamper-proof yes-or-no vote with one address per voter.

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.