P2P Essentials: Beyond Blockchain Technologies and NFTs
What you'll learn
- NFTs
- Metaverse
- Blocks and Blockchain technologies
- Decentraland
- What is Ethereum
- Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies
- CryptoArt
- Decentralization and P2P Basics
- Hashes and Merkle Trees
- Proof-of-work and consensus mechanisms
- What is a Smart Contract
- Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs)
- How a dApp works
- DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) and Aragon
- How to browse and create content in the Decentralized Web
- What is IPFS
- What is the Hypercore Protocol
- How to create your own P2P website with the Hypercore Protocol
- Sustainability and Social Implications of Decentralized Technologies
- Social Implications and Sustainability of P2P Technologies
- Art and Real Estate in the Blockchain
Requirements
- This course does no require any previous knowledge.
- It can be understood by people without any specific background.
- It is thought for technical and non-technical students
Description
In this course, you will get a full understanding of decentralization and the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) web.
We will start explaining how blockchain technology works, and how Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies gave arise to decentralized finance.
We will delve into Non Fungible Tokens, and we will focus on specific actual examples to show you how the blockchain has been used to monetize art and even create a digital replicate of the Real Estate industry.
We will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of specific distributed technologies and dig into different protocols beyond blockchains, such as Holochain, IPFS or Hypercore. You will learn to browse the decentralized web and publish your own content using these procotols and specific browsers. You will experience the Metaverse and its fascinating game-changing potential, learning about NFTs (non-fungible tokens).
At the end of the course, you will be able to talk confidently about what is Ethereum, what is a Smart Contract, what is Web3, and how a dApp works. You even will be able to create your own P2P website by using the Hypercore Protocol without the need for any initial technical knowledge, and to experience a decentralized virtual world through an avatar in Decentraland.
We will navigate the implications of distributed ledgers and smart contracts for decision-making, exploring how blockchains and off-chain voting technologies can bring governance to digital communities. This will lead us to talk about Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs).
Before finishing the course, we will discuss the social implications of these technologies and their sustainability, distinguishing in which context they should be used.
You will end up with a basic understanding of P2P Essentials, required building blocks to be part of a decentralized future.
Who this course is for:
- Entrepreneurs
- Software developers
- Activists
- Educators
- College Students
- Professionals of IT, Law or Finance
- Researchers
- General public
- Companies interested in blockchain, decentralized technologies and the metaverse
Instructor
Diego González holds a PhD in Information Science, a MSc in Artificial Intelligence and a BSc in Computer Systems Engineering.
He currently works for researchers at Harvard University, CNRS, and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology developing projects related to the Metaverse. He is also Blockchain Expert and Software Engineer at Docuten Tech, and has a long experience both in the IT industry and in research. He also leads one of the districts of Decentraland, running a virtual campus in a fully decentralized virtual world powered by blockchain technology and VR.
He is the founder of the SciArt Lab, a Research & Development Lab in the Metaverse for the open exploration of Science, Art, and Technology with a focus on multidisciplinary knowledge and technology-driven creativity. The SciArt Lab also explores the potential of virtual reality for therapy, education, emergent economies, NFTs, and decentralized governance.
He was the co-founder and coordinator of Bitmind, a commons-oriented startup to explore the potential of Blockchain Technologies and the implementation of DAOs/OVNs on Ethereum. Bitmind had an international impact in the context of Applied Research & Open Source development around Blockchain-based organizations. Now it is a project of the P2P Foundation.
He has been Research Fellow at the P2P Lab, a spin-off of Tallin University of Technology and the P2P Foundation, and collaborated with the University of North Carolina, the Global Brain Institute of the Free University of Brussels and the Critical Making Lab at the University of Toronto, on diverse topics such as Complex Adaptive Systems, P2P dynamics, Decentralized Technologies & Blockchain, AI, STEAM education and the Social Implications of Technology.
His multidisciplinary research is focused on information technologies, P2P social dynamics, blockchains, artificial societies modeling, complex science, computational simulation of collective production of knowledge, and peer learning.